ore of humanity, sympathy for man and his experiences, inner
freedom, might have saved him. But it was just the poetic gift that the
man was lamentably without. And so, freighted with too much erudition
and too little wisdom, Reger went aground.

Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg of Vienna is the great troubling presence of modern
music. His vast, sallow skull lowers over it like a sort of North Cape.
For with him, with the famous cruel five orchestral and nine piano
pieces, we seem to be entering the arctic zone of musical art. None of
the old beacons, none of the old stars, can guide us longer in these
frozen wastes. Strange, menacing forms surround us, and the light is
bleak and chill and faint. The characteristic compositions of Strawinsky
and Ornstein, too, have no tonality, lack every vestige of a pure chord,
and exhibit unanalyzable harmonies, and rhythms of a violent novelty, in
the most amazing conjunctions. But they, at least, impart a certain
sense of liberation. They, at least, bear certain witness to the
emotional flight of the composer. An instinct pulses here, an instinct
barbarous and unbridled, if you will, but indubitably exuberant and
vivid. These works have a necessity. These harmonies have color. This
music is patently speech. But the later compositions of Schoenberg
withhold themselves, refuse our contact. They baffle with their
apparently wilful ugliness, and bewilder with their geometric cruelty
and coldness. One gets no intimation that in fashioning them the
composer has liberated himself. On the contrary, they seem icy and
brain-spun. They are like men formed not out of flesh and bone and
blood, but out of glass and wire and concrete. They creak and groan and
grate in their motion. They have all the deathly pallor of abstractions.

And Schoenberg remains a troubling presence as long as one persists in
regarding these particular pieces as the expression of a sensibility, as
long as one persists in seeking in them the lyric flight. For though one
perceives them with the intellect one can scarcely feel them musically.
The conflicting rhythms of the third of the "Three Pieces for
Pianoforte" clash without generating heat, without, after all, really
sounding. No doubt, there is a certain admirable uncompromisingness, a
certain Egyptian severity, in the musical line of the first of the
"Three." But if there is such a thing as form without significance in
music, might not these compositions serv