Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire Revisited: Acceptance of Vocal Expression

Abstract

The vocal part in Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire (1912) has been highly discussed with regard to its contradictory instructions, which have led to a variety of different performances. The current study took a systematic approach from an interdisciplinary angle to investigate the vocal expression on a detailed level by drawing on features mainly investigated in linguistics and disregarding the accuracy of pitch. For the first time, the vocal expression in twenty different interpretations from 1940 to 2010 was evaluated by a larger audience consisting of twenty-five voice experts, and the data were analyzed statistically. Before participants evaluated the first stanza from piece No. 7, “The Sick Moon,” they were given information about the composer and the piece itself. The preface to Pierrot was read and supplemented with quotes by Schoenberg from later correspondence. The participants were students from the field of speech science and phonetics, carefully chosen to represent a homogeneous group with regard to their ability to evaluate voices. They were all familiar with the complex questionnaire used in the study, which consisted of twenty features of vocal expression, covering different categories, such as pitch, loudness, vocal sound, and articulation, as well as complex phenomena, such as mode of phonation or tempo. The ratings reflected either an acceptance of a feature or a rejection; for example, the feature, “mode of phonation,” could be rated as “just about right,” represented in the middle of the rating scale, or “too sung” or “too spoken.” By comparing the relations of the features and the differences between interpretations, certain statements by Schoenberg could be revisited regarding their implications for perception.