“A True and Genuine Music”: Berg’s Linear Counterpoint

While many post-tonal languages, particularly those of Schoenberg, Webern and Berg, depart from tonality, they never abandon musical logic based on voice-leading, i.e., linear progressions. Indeed, they maintain an emphasis on voice-leading, or goal-directed linear motion, as a means of creating structure, continuity and unity. As a result, it is possible, even absent a tonal framework, to perceive in many post-tonal works an underlying linear-contrapuntal structure and to hear and understand certain pitches and sonorities in a post-tonal work as structuring elements in conjunction with interrelated, linear, goal-directed virtual voices. To illustrate this concept, the author presents analyses of an early song by Julius Schloss, a student of Alban Berg, and the first and last songs of Berg’s Fünf Orchesterlieder nach Ansichtskarten-Texten von Peter Altenberg Op. 4, also known as the Altenberg Lieder. The analyses provide a thorough and detailed explanation of the linear counterpoint underlying a limited vocabulary of motives and perceived salient pitches and virtual voices. By further explaining a linear analytical approach to these works, and providing a logically rigorous analytical apparatus and terminology, this study contributes to the development of a methodology that is responsive to the compositional techniques and musical characteristics associated with many post-tonal works, as well as pieces in mixed tonal-post-tonal languages.