Thread: Schoenberg: Bogeyman or Messiah of classical music?. . .

Originally Posted by millionrainbows

Why is it that detractors of Schoenberg see him as "destroying" tonality? It's not like tonality and harmonic music "died," because, after all, that would mean we wouldn't have had The Beatles (Revolution No.9 excepted, of course). That would have been a real shame.

Tonality will always exist, and the larger umbrella of "harmonic music" will always exist, as long as people have ears and can suck milk instinctively (you can swallow, can't you?).

Bogeyman? Yes, most definitely! He embodies the fears and insecurities of those who fear the demise of the visceral, instinctive blanket-woobie of tonality. After all, what else could we listen to in the grocery store while purchasing cat food and coffee? It's all tonal. Tonality is as ubiquitous as God, as prevalent as Man's ego, as natural as having babies, as profitable as war. It has been, and always will be, forever and ever. Amen.

Now, I'm going to run a bath and listen to some Webern. Ahhhh...

We should smash all the bottles of the French wine in the world, for after all, isn't wine a superficial affair? Drink it in the tub, drink it paired with cheese and fruits, drink it while taking, while working, while writing, while working, while talking and writing or watching television. An infant could drink wine. Drinking wine takes no concentration whatsoever! Cheese too, is too easy to consume. You barely need to chew! Dump it all into the sea!

What we need is food that requires all of our concentration to get just get down our throats, and then some.

I propose that henceforth we all dine on raw cow hide and Rhinoceros leather. For desert, cactus and tree barks. It will take all of our concentration and will to just get it in our mouths. It will never be trivial, it will never be easy.


Next, we should aim even higher and stuff steel into our mouths like this man!

Originally Posted by millionrainbows

Bogeyman? Yes, most definitely! He embodies the fears and insecurities of those who fear the demise of the visceral, instinctive blanket-woobie of tonality. After all, what else could we listen to in the grocery store while purchasing cat food and coffee? It's all tonal. Tonality is as ubiquitous as God, as prevalent as Man's ego, as natural as having babies, as profitable as war. It has been, and always will be, forever and ever. Amen.

Now, I'm going to run a bath and listen to some Webern. Ahhhh...

LMAO! What an unusual person you are!

Originally Posted by brianwalker

We should smash all the bottles of the French wine in the world, for after all, isn't wine a superficial affair? Drink it in the tub, drink it paired with cheese and fruits, drink it while taking, while working, while writing, while working, while talking and writing or watching television. An infant could drink wine. Drinking wine takes no concentration whatsoever! Cheese too, is too easy to consume. You barely need to chew! Dump it all into the sea!

What we need is food that requires all of our concentration to get just get down our throats, and then some.

I propose that henceforth we all dine on raw cow hide and Rhinoceros leather. For desert, cactus and tree barks. It will take all of our concentration and will to just get it in our mouths. It will never be trivial, it will never be easy.


Next, we should aim even higher and stuff steel into our mouths like this man!

Do you eat food from a microwave, or is that too modern and newfangled?

Originally Posted by science

Do you eat food from a microwave, or is that too modern and newfangled?

Too modern; I cook and heat everything over an open fire sustained on logs I've cut from my own forest trees grown on soil supplemented with only homemade fertilizer.

Originally Posted by brianwalker

homemade fertilizer.

Well, I'm certainly not eating at your place!

Originally Posted by science

Do you eat food from a microwave, or is that too modern and newfangled?

I especially like my bread toasted in a microwave. The result is a sort of amorphous goo rather like some pieces of music I know. That is unless you over do it and it becomes a petrified fossil like some other pieces of music I know.

He's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy!

Originally Posted by BurningDesire

Neither. Just a great composer, a brilliant artist. I think he had many brilliant and progressive ideas, but he was far from being the only composer around that time to have very revolutionary ideas about music.

This is exactly how I feel about him.

I don't care. I didn't even know about serial music when I borrowed Dorati's Second Viennese School album from a friend years ago. I just knew I liked it!

Originally Posted by Petwhac

Perhaps for you the sound of running water helps with the appreciation of Webern. I would find it a distraction. Unfortunately you may have got through his complete works and still not have a full bath.

So true! It is infinitely preferable for a composer to write hundreds of bland, forgettable works in addition to a few really great ones, as opposed to just the few really great ones. Quantity is the greatest measure of quality there is!

Originally Posted by crmoorhead

He's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy!

How kinky X3 I ship SchoenbergXStravinsky, personally :3

The ironic thing is that Schoenberg never regarded himself as an iconoclast and destroyer of musical tradition . He was neither rebelling against nor rejecting the great music of the past . On the contrary, no one had greater love and reverence for the great composers of the past , and few had such profound knowledge of and understanding of it .
I love his quote about his music : My music isn't avant-garde, just badly played ".

Originally Posted by superhorn

I love his quote about his music : My music isn't avant-garde, just badly played ".

Played well, it sounds almost exactly like late Mozart.

He developed (later in his career) a new approach to composition that unchained it from tonality - he added to the rich diversity in music which we, as listeners, are privileged to enjoy as we so choose. He was neither bogeyman nor messiah - simply an innovator - one of many in a long line of innovators...

To those who think Schoenberg was a bogeyman (eg. took music in the wrong direction) - don't you think the plurality of music today - a lot (or most of it?) different to Schoenberg's - testament to how he did not destroy anything. He just gave composers options, they could take it or leave it. He actually balked at the bogeyman label. He did have a Messiah complex early on, but so did many big time innovators of the past (eg. Beethoven, Wagner). Later on, Schoenberg became more humble and actually said that the slings and arrows he got from people against him (call them what you will) actually encouraged him more to do what he was doing. To stick to his path, I suppose just like any other composer who could do that (eg. those living under totalitarian regimes did not always have that luxury).

A famous anecdote is that, listening to Grieg's piano concerto at a concert, Schoenberg turned to his friend next to him and said something like 'I wish I could compose music like that.' I think that's indicative of a dry and maybe bitter realisation that what he was doing was not easy to do. He was not composing music that was like the Grieg, with flowing melodies and a kind of natural beauty. He was worried of being labelled the destroyer of tradition and in some ways, of beauty and maybe innocence too. Hence the almost apologetic famous line 'I was a conservative who was forced to become a radical.'

He got no brownie points from conservatives and even kind of hard-core Modernists (eg. Adorno) criticised him for being too tonal at times (eg. ending the Ode to Napoleon in a fuzzy E-flat). Funny how early in his career, Schoenberg was pulled down by conservatives for the reason that Transfigured Night did not end in a resolved enough way, it ended in a fuzzy D major. So early on, he's being too radical according to some, at the other end of his career, he's not enough radical. You can't please everybody. All you can do is do your thing, play out your own visions. But I think that Schoenberg's music, some of it became accepted into the Modern repertoire during his lifetime - eg. Transfigured Night and Pierrot Lunaire as well. These I would not say where easy for me to grasp, but once I did come to appreciate them, they are among my favourite works of that early 20th century period.