Wrong-Note Music

Sometimes we (musicians, mostly, but maybe others) think and talk about music, neoclassical music in particular, as "wrong-note music"*, with the idea that behind a piece of music with a witty and/or droll and/or eccentric surface there is some historical source from which it departs.  This idea is sometimes a useful way of getting closer to pieces which "work" while doing things "wrong."

A friend on Facebook (not a "friend") recently posted some notes about a moment in a Schoenberg piano piece (Op. 11, Nr. 1) in which a tone doubled at the octave appears to "resolve" down a semitone, contextually a "dissonant" octave resolving to a "consonant" seventh.  I was struck by two things in this fragment, one of which was that we don't talk about Schoenberg's music as "wrong note" music in the way in which we might with music by Stravinsky or Hindemith or neoclassicists. I think this is mostly because, with Schoenberg, there are not — or at least not readily — "right note" repertoire sources hiding behind the piece at hand.  This is because Schoenberg did not compose directly with models, grabbed with cheerful disregard for sequential music history, but honestly saw his own composition at the sum end of a sequence.**   The second thing was that this "free atonal" piece is really a good example of a piece that didn't really didn't follow the rules of either traditional tonal voice leading (for example, that tone doubled at the octave was an implicit doubled third above the root, a bitter of awkwardness that would have been avoided in more conventional tonal contexts and might have been witty in Stravinsky, but was here indeed awkward, hence inviting a "resolution" which is stylish (as in "Wienerisch') but doesn't either resolve the awkwardness or introduce much wit)  nor was it yet even attempting the "rules" that would emerge later, and most explicitly with his 12-tone technique (for example, paying attention to complementary distributions of pitch resources.)

But these two observations suggested to me that there actually could be a "right note" piece — not a real, historical piece, but a real bit of either more tonal and/or strictly proto-12-tone music — behind Schoenberg's "wrong notes"  and that it would be interesting to try to dis- or recover that hidden piece.  Here's one possibility:

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*Yes, the abundant quotation marks in this item are intentional.
** I should stick something in here about how Schoenberg's compositional practice, particularly in pieces like this, was less a careful, slow, and formal working-out of the implications of material than a fast, if not frenzied, improvisation on the page, working more from musical instinct than planning and intellect.