Introduction

Summary

while we hunger

for a clear and beaming truth to settle our

perspectives down (a foundation upon which to

base a way of life, religion, or musical theory)

we need even more the muddled doubts of our

seeking: for to know is to be at an end …

A. R. Ammons, Glare, number 103

No composer was more responsible for changes in the landscape of twentieth-century music than Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), and no other composer's music inspired a commensurate quantity and quality of technical description in the second half of the twentieth century. Yet the correlations between Schoenberg's musical thought and larger questions of cultural significance in and since his time have not been well addressed by musical scholarship: formalistic descriptions of music theory do not generally engage larger questions in the history of ideas, while scholars without an understanding of the formidable musical technique are ill-equipped to understand the music with any profundity of thought. To cite a case in point, the authors of Wittgenstein's Vienna claim “Schönberg, unlike Hanslick, considered the question, how a composition sounds, as having no importance.” The reader's ability to hear Schoenberg's music with any comprehension correlates directly to the perceived absurdity of that claim. I cannot imagine anything parallel being said about a major philosopher – X discovered that ideas have no importance.