Uploaded January 2011 | Updated September 2026, 53 minutes ago
"Barbara Pentland (2 January 1912 to 5 February 2000) is perhaps the best-known of a large and extremely diverse group of Canadian twelve-tone composers. Two important experiences shaped the compositional path she walked from the late 1940s until her death in 2000. The first was a summer spent at the MacDowell Colony in 1947. There, Pentland met Dika Newlin, a former student of Schoenberg's who was at the colony to work on her translation of René Leibowitz's 'Schoenberg et son école.' Newlin was ideally situated to explain Schoenberg's method, and Pentland began almost immediately to write twelvetone pieces, beginning with the Octet for Winds (1948). The second influential experience was Pentland's attendance in the summer of 1955 at the Darmstadt Summer Course for New Music—Pentland imagined her own compositional style as divided into two periods: P. D. (pre-Darmstadt) and A. D. (after-Darmstadt). There, she not only heard some of the most recent European music, but became particularly interested in the music of Webern, the central figure for so many of the European serialists. I really got into it when I went to the MacDowell Colony and met Dika Newlin, who was a pupil of Schoenberg. And the ideas of the Schoenberg method interested me, but more as Webern used them. Schoenberg himself—I didn't find his music interested me. It seemed it stemmed too much from the nineteenth century, and I had a horror of the nineteenth century....But Webern was a kind of fresh way of looking at the relationship of tones and the use of simple material in a more sophisticated and very strong way, and I began to think in that direction. So my music took on more of the controls of the twelve-tone, serial technique. I rarely used it very strictly, because I am fairly intuitive in composing and I couldn't put a strait jacket on things that wanted to emerge on their own so to speak. So I allowed it a free rein; I used it as a kind of governing principle. And I have very rarely written works that could be called in any way in strict serial technique....I used to be more interested in the bones of music, the structure, and the emotional impact of line against line and note against note, in a sense of very great strength and clarity. In other words, not wanting to cover up with any color. It's a way of thinking that appeals to me because I was always trying to escape from the nineteenth century. There, everything was overstuffed and heavy. Beginning in the late 1960s, Pentland began to incorporate aleatoric passages within her twelve-tone music. In such passages, which she calls "zones," performers are required to improvise in specified ways on chosen musical materials, themselves derived from the twelve-tone music outside the zones.'". Joseph Straus, "Twelve-Tone Music in America"
Born in Winnipeg, Pentland suffered from a heart disorder which significantly limited both her physical and social activities during her childhood. As a result, she devoted much of her time from an early age to academic pursuits and other intellectual activities. At the age of 9 she began studying the piano in her native city at the Rupert's Land Girls' School. She soon developed an interest in music composition, but her early ventures into this area were strongly discouraged by both her teacher and her relatively wealthy and conservative family who viewed the pursuit as an eccentric hobby that was "too exciting for a delicate child".
Despite her family's objections, Pentland continued to compose privately as a young teenager. She finally was encouraged in this pursuit by one of her teachers, the organist and conductor Frederick H. Blair, who taught her piano and music theory while she attended boarding school in Montreal from 1927-1929. She then studied composition with family approval in Paris in 1929 with Cécile Gauthiez while attending a finishing school in that city. She then returned to her native city where she studied under Hugh Bancroft (organ) and Eva Clare (piano) from 1930--1936 and embarked on a career as a concert pianist.
"Barbara Pentland (2 January 1912 to 5 February 2000) is perhaps the best-known of a large and extremely diverse group of Canadian twelve-tone composers. Two important experiences shaped the compositional path she walked from the late 1940s until her death in 2000. The first was a summer spent at the MacDowell Colony in 1947. There, Pentland met Dika Newlin, a former student of Schoenberg's who was at the colony to work on her translation of René Leibowitz's 'Schoenberg et son école.' Newlin was ideally situated to explain Schoenberg's method, and Pentland began almost immediately to write twelvetone pieces, beginning with the Octet for Winds (1948). The second influential experience was Pentland's attendance in the summer of 1955 at the Darmstadt Summer Course for New Music—Pentland imagined her own compositional style as divided into two periods: P. D. (pre-Darmstadt) and A. D. (after-Darmstadt). There, she not only heard some of the most recent European music, but became particularly interested in the music of Webern, the central figure for so many of the European serialists. I really got into it when I went to the MacDowell Colony and met Dika Newlin, who was a pupil of Schoenberg. And the ideas of the Schoenberg method interested me, but more as Webern used them. Schoenberg himself—I didn't find his music interested me. It seemed it stemmed too much from the nineteenth century, and I had a horror of the nineteenth century....But Webern was a kind of fresh way of looking at the relationship of tones and the use of simple material in a more sophisticated and very strong way, and I began to think in that direction. So my music took on more of the controls of the twelve-tone, serial technique. I rarely used it very strictly, because I am fairly intuitive in composing and I couldn't put a strait jacket on things that wanted to emerge on their own so to speak. So I allowed it a free rein; I used it as a kind of governing principle. And I have very rarely written works that could be called in any way in strict serial technique....I used to be more interested in the bones of music, the structure, and the emotional impact of line against line and note against note, in a sense of very great strength and clarity. In other words, not wanting to cover up with any color. It's a way of thinking that appeals to me because I was always trying to escape from the nineteenth century. There, everything was overstuffed and heavy. Beginning in the late 1960s, Pentland began to incorporate aleatoric passages within her twelve-tone music. In such passages, which she calls "zones," performers are required to improvise in specified ways on chosen musical materials, themselves derived from the twelve-tone music outside the zones.'". Joseph Straus, "Twelve-Tone Music in America"
Born in Winnipeg, Pentland suffered from a heart disorder which significantly limited both her physical and social activities during her childhood. As a result, she devoted much of her time from an early age to academic pursuits and other intellectual activities. At the age of 9 she began studying the piano in her native city at the Rupert's Land Girls' School. She soon developed an interest in music composition, but her early ventures into this area were strongly discouraged by both her teacher and her relatively wealthy and conservative family who viewed the pursuit as an eccentric hobby that was "too exciting for a delicate child".
Despite her family's objections, Pentland continued to compose privately as a young teenager. She finally was encouraged in this pursuit by one of her teachers, the organist and conductor Frederick H. Blair, who taught her piano and music theory while she attended boarding school in Montreal from 1927-1929. She then studied composition with family approval in Paris in 1929 with Cécile Gauthiez while attending a finishing school in that city. She then returned to her native city where she studied under Hugh Bancroft (organ) and Eva Clare (piano) from 1930--1936 and embarked on a career as a concert pianist.
![Arnold Schoenberg, Herzgewächse, Op. 20 [Lucy Shelton, Da Capo Chamber Players, Oliver Knussen]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Pz98sU_rPK8/mqdefault.jpg "Arnold Schoenberg, Herzgewächse, Op. 20 [Lucy Shelton, Da Capo Chamber Players, Oliver Knussen]
Herzgewächse was similar to Erwartung in that it is not musically organized by a strict development of an evident theme. It experiments with instrumental color and range, But perhaps most interesting about Herzgewächse, particularly in connection with Pierrot Lunaire, is the relationship of music to text, a relationship made even more evident by the fact that Schoenberg was beginning the text for what would become the unfinished project Die Jakobsleiter. Schoenberg was beginning to explore more deeply the possibilities of expressing in a mixture of language and music the theological and philosophical. He began to search for a link between music and words that would relinquish a dependency on visual props or the creation of mental pictures. But in Herzgewächse and to a lesser extent Pierrot Lunaire, the notion of the poetic still reigned as the dominant connecting link between music and language. Herzgewächse was not performed immediately after its composition, but only in 1927-1928, partly due to the unusual ensemble employed and the demands made on the vocalist. In the article The Relationship to the Text, Schoenberg argued, following Schopenhauer, that music, because of its power and character, must never attempt to illustrate text or depict that which texts represent linguistically. Rather, as in the case of a Schubert song or Schoenbergs own songs, Op. 2 and 3, the direct contact with the sound of the first words out to be sufficient to permit the development of a musical statement by the composer without any reference to the literal meaning or poetical context of the poetry being set. The sounds of words rather than the mental pictures they generated, or their grammatical or sense content, triggered a so-called direct comparison. The real essence of the poems no the illustration of content was unlocked by music, and essence unreachable and imperceptible without the aid of music. As Schoenberg concluded, music and text relate to each other that is to sy they complement each other on an extremely high, spiritual level, evident only in retrospect as a result of the integration of the two media at the hands of the composer. But in the ordinary sense, in terms of declamation or tempo or loudness, or in terms of narrative description, music and text had to diverge if, in fact, music was to retain its autonomy and power and if the higher realm of connectedness of music and language was to be achieved. In this tantalizing but somewhat inconsistent theoretical exposition, Schoenberg embraced an idea that language needs to be purified if it is to be, as Kraus suggested, the mother of ideas in the arts. If language performs its ethical imperative to speak its truths in the broadest sense a spiritual unity that can be revealed by art and music will emerge. However, the kind of ordinary language we hear in daily life or read in newspapers as an insufficient model. What the painter and the composer must do is to take off from language and generate works in whose expression and through whose perception a higher realm of human experience is created and revealed. Language as a given text provides a hint of the aesthetic idea. That hint is often hidden from the view of the composer who approaches the text in the ordinary way. It is in this framework that would should listen to the connection between the Maeterlinck poem and the music of Herzgewächse, particularly where the poet describes moods and the evolution of sentiment (e.g., sinking to rest, listless melancholy). It is neither the metaphoric nor the literal leaning of Maeterlincks poem that connects to the music or justifies its presence. The text has been transformed and has become an integral telement of the musical discourse.")
