Berg and modernity: Ambivalence, synthesis, and remaking of tradition in the String Quartet op. 3

Taylor, Benedict (2009) Berg and modernity: Ambivalence, synthesis, and remaking of tradition in the String Quartet op. 3. Studia Musicologica, 50 (1-2). pp. 29-48. ISSN 1788-6244

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Abstract

Alban Berg has long been seen as the most conservative member of the Second Viennese School, a ‘moderate modernist’, an accessible throwback to Romanticism for audiences afraid of the supposedly more radical innovations of Schoenberg or Webern, and hence for much of the 20th century has suffered from the stigma of a perceived lack of progressivism. Yet recent decades have witnessed a gradual shift in critical opinion on this issue, coinciding with a loosening of the claims of high modernity and arguably a move to a more ‘postmodern’ outlook. This paper explores further the relationship between the historical tendency in Berg’s music and the complex notion of modernity through an analysis of the early String Quartet op. 3, his first large-scale atonal composition, focusing on the idea of synthesis between old and new, conservative and progressive — the nature of the modernity which arises out of his music’s relationship with the past. This is the most problematic category in relation to advancing Berg’s credentials as a modernist but thus possibly the most interesting, and also useful since it can ultimately allow a critique of the whole notion of the modern imperative.

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