Arnold Schoenberg: Classic or Dud?

I never really knew what george was talking about, or why Sonic Youth came up on a Schoenberg thread, but if the point was that Thurston Moore is a pseud because he didn't play Wuorinen and Babbitt, that is definitely an important opinion that needs to be heard.

Schoenberg one of the all-time greatest, though.

serialism is certainly fortunate

Not sure what I meant by this. Maybe something like 'in retrospect, serialism writ large has yielded more interesting results than its integral variant (à la Boulez, et al.)'? In which case, I haven't really changed my mind on that front. (Tbf I was considerably more ESL-ish in my teens.)

I still think Berg > Webern > Schoenberg, but it's much closer now.

Old ILX was wild.

Personally offended and sickened that these wretched poseurs sonic toof didn’t cover philomel in their supposedly definitive history of 20th Century music. PS Rap sux.

lapsed indie kids protest too much

schoenberg > berg > webern for me. berg's oeuvre probably more consistently excellent but he didn't write pierrot lunaire or a survivor form warsaw and as great as his operas are i prefer moses und aron. webern's whole miniature thing gets on my nerves somehow though i admit the 2nd movement of the piano variations slaps hard

Moses and Aron needs way more love. Surprised that the Met did it once.

too late to ask george what he meant now unfortunately

didn't he ramble

i think some connection to that album of 20th cent composers stuff they did, i dunno

You know what's really good, though, is the third string quartet.

been listening schoenberg as pop

I don’t know from 12 tone or theory in the slightest but this guy has so many damn tunes its incredible, in every phase of his career

piano suite and serenade for strings I’ve seen dismissed as dry academic experiments but they’re both hooky as hell, and potentially danceable

3rd quartet grabbed me first with that riff but all the others are great too, no 2 especially moving me atm. string trio is pretty intense even by his standards though i think that’s sort of the point (probably the intense emotionality of his work bothers some people more than the “atonality” or whatever?)

this all comes from an utterly superficial overview of his music instead of the kind of hardcore intellectual investment you’re supposed to need to appreciate him at all. which I’m sure would be very rewarding in many ways. but I feel like I’ve been lied to about this by the classical gatekeepers. no one told me about the tunes man

^^^ gets it.

No, you should not need heavy intellectual investment to appreciate his work imo - he himself had very little formal training and was mostly self-taught. He was an Expressionist and a Romantic. (Analysis can certainly help but it is not and should not be the only way his work can be approached.)

To Kandinsky, he wrote (from Ross, The Rest Is Noise):

Art belongs to the unconscious! One must express oneself! Express oneself directly! Not one’s taste, or one’s upbringing, or one’s intelligence, knowledge or skill. 

To Busoni (from Auner, Music of the 20th and 21st Centuries):

It is impossible for a person to have only one sensation at a time. One has thousands simultaneously. And these thousands can no more readily be added together than an apple and a pear. They go their own ways. And this variegation, this multifariousness, this illogicality which our senses demonstrate, the illogicality presented by their interactions, set forth by some mounting rush of blood, by some reactions of the senses or
the nerves, this I should like to have in my music.

Don't get me wrong, he (despite his lack of formal training) became a famous theorist and teacher (and then professor) as well and there is a lot going on formally - but he would have definitely been happy with people appreciating his music in a visceral, immediate way.