The Path to the New Music

Music, Evolution and the Ladder of Progress

“…The question that concerns Webern as a musical genealogist is, "how much space can be assigned to the presentation of musical ideas." (18) He begins by assigning the origin of the seven-note modal scale to the ancient Greeks, and sees subsequent musical progress up to the time of Bach as "the conquest of the tonal field." While all the formal principles later to be elicited by Bach and his followers are already present in germ form in Gregorian chant, Webern notes, continual refinement of the motivic principle and expansion of the tonal field from five notes to seven, and then finally to all twelve leads upwards to Renaissance polyphony, Bach, Beethoven, and Schoenberg.…”