Schoenberg and the ‘Logic’ of Atonality

Extract

In his recent biography of Schoenberg, Willi Reich quotes the composer's acknowledgement of ‘the compulsion of an inexorable but unconscious logic of harmonic construction’, and of ‘an inner compulsion that is stronger than education’, without making the point that musical analysts still tend to find atonal logic inextricable, and that the compositional procedures of a piece such as Op. 11 No. 3 can still not adequately be taught—even if it has made an appearance in a recent GCE syllabus. Reich himself ‘explains’ the emancipation of the dissonance as a thickening of polyphonic thought: there are ‘no dissonant chords’ in a horizontal line. It is, of course, a great deal less simple than that.