Whose Fault is the Speaking Voice?

Extract

It is more than half a century since Schoenberg first introduced rhythmically organized speech, with relative—not absolute!—pitch outlines defined, into his music; significantly enough, the abandonment of normal song first happened in his earlier atonal works, such as Pierrot lunaire and Die Glückliche Hand (which I call ‘The Knack’ in English). That this disintegration of pitch followed hard on the heels of the disintegration of tonality is a simple historical fact which criticism has hitherto altogether neglected. We have been so preoccupied with the loss of key on the one hand and the speaking voice's loss of pitch on the other, that we have never stopped to consider that—and, most important, why—the two belong together.