This study investigates the relationship between the lyrics and the melody of The Book of the Hanging Gardens (Das Buch der hängenden Gärten), Op. 15, a song for the piano and voice out of the songs by Arnold Schönberg (1874-1951), to identify the ...
This study investigates the relationship between the lyrics and the melody of The Book of the Hanging Gardens (Das Buch der hängenden Gärten), Op. 15, a song for the piano and voice out of the songs by Arnold Schönberg (1874-1951), to identify the major characteristics the vocalist should understand to sing the melody of the atonal music more comfortably.
Arnold Schönberg is one of the most important composers in the history of Western Music of the 20th century, and his works range from the tonal music compositions to atonal music compositions from the end of the19th century to the 20th century. The Book of the Hanging Gardens of this study is an atonal composition, and is a song cycle composed of relatively shorter pieces, which is efficient to compare and analyze the relationship between the melody and accompaniment, as well as the music tendencies.
Part 1 of the study investigates the musical trends of Schönberg based on his life and his vocal pieces. The musical trends of Schönberg are generally divided into four periods : The first period shows the characteristics of post-Romanticism; the second period shows the characteristics of Expressionism with atonality; the third period generally uses dodecaphony (twelve-tone technique); and the fourth period comprehensively uses various methods, encompassing the overall periods. In terms of the musical trends by the periods, during the first and second periods, which are the early to middle stages, Schönberg generally composed not only vocal music but also independent vocal works that include instrumental music centered on song cycles, during the third period, composed vocal works for choruses and operas, and during the fourth period, composed oratorios with great religious characters. As time passes, he enlarges the scales of the works and directly shows his philosophical views.
Part 2 of the study analyzes the poetry and harmony of The Book of the Hanging Gardens (Das Buch der hängenden Gärten), Op. 15, No. 1, 3, 7 and 14, which is the main topic of this study. To emphasize certain poetic diction, Schönberg applies dissonances with relative differences within the atonal melody to have different densities within a single song. In addition, the horizontal musical aspects that arise from the melody of the vocal part or the piano motifs with the vertical aspects form an organized structure by the compositions of the poetry and the poetic diction. Therefore, in this piece, both the vocal part and the piano part exist as a single independent part, and if needed, the piano part plays not only the role of an accompaniment but also the counterpoint of the vocal part.
This study investigated the relationship between the harmonic structure and the melody to allow the vocalist to comfortably perform the vocal part of The Book of the Hanging Gardens (Das Buch der hängenden Gärten), Op. 15 by Arnold Schönberg, and identified that the piece has melodies with structurally different densities by the characteristics of the poetic diction by analyzing the relationship from various dimensions of the vocal part and the piano part. Therefore it is expected that the vocalist can express the vocal lines with a clearer standard by identifying the densities of the piano part, in other words, whether the distance between the tones of the notes is relatively narrow, or if the harmonic progress has a more complex structure, and so on.