Schoenberg, Boulez, and Twelve-Tone Composition as “Ideal Type”

Abstract

Abstract Twelve-tone music is often defined empirically, in generalized terms of compositional practice. I contend that historians and theorists have neglected a heuristic perspective of twelve-tone composition. One heuristic model proves particularly helpful: the “ideal type,” first described by social scientist Max Weber in “Objectivity' in Social Science and Social Policy” (1904). Weber's ideal type can help to move the discussion away from scientistic ideas of problem solving and overly abstract invocations of “the twelve-tone idea,” and toward what Weber would call the “cultural significance” of twelve-tone methodologies (a move in line with influential revisions to the historiography of scientific “problem solving” proposed by Thomas Kuhn and Imre Lakatos). Differences of perspective between Arnold Schoenberg and the young Pierre Boulez, at about the time the latter first arrived at Darmstadt, highlight the difficulty in establishing a coherent history of twelve-tone compositional practice (as opposed to a heuristic “ideal type”). The anonymous typescript “Komposition mit zwöölf Töönen,” linked with Schoenberg's Viennese circle of the early 1920s, reveals how the early twelve-tone “discovery” described by Schoenberg is, no less than the later descriptions by Boulez, an a posteriori construct—or, as Kuhn and Lakatos might say, an ideological colonization of past practice.