5 - Alban Berg’s Eclectic Serialism

Summary

Alban Berg’s serial works (c. 1925–35) show his ability to use the twelve-tone method of composition as a form of exegesis for his personal, intellectual, and musical heritage in musical narratives suffused with apparent contradictions. In so doing, Berg combined what has been understood as antithetical ideas in an overarching system that brings together his modernistic aesthetics and the art of the past through textures in which twelve-tone serialism and tonality are interwoven. Problematising scholarship that attempts to understand Berg’s music based on Schoenberg’s compositional models, I argue that Berg followed the lead of Fritz Heinrich Klein and Theodor Adorno and embraced contradiction as a ‘category of thought’ in his compositional process. Berg’s approach is evident from the construction of the series to compositions such as the Violin Concerto (1935), which contains a web of musical and extra-musical significations that continues to challenge existing analytical models.