Kandinsky working

Wuorinen on Peyser on Schoenberg

"Joan Peyser has long maintained that the debt the world of present-day music owes to Arnold Schoenberg is incalculable.  ... [W]hile those who know the world of twentieth-century music have no doubt about the crucial importance of Schoenberg's contribution, the larger 'music-loving' public has (especially in recent years) been consistently misled by journalists about his music.  They have been told repeatedly that his work was a 'mistake,' that their own conservative tastes embody truths about the eternal nature of music, and that Schoenberg the composer, thinker, and moral force in music is disappearing.  With her unique combination of journalistic skill and musical sophistication, Joan Peyser has managed to stand against this knownothingism in exactly the same forum in which it has been promulgated.  We are all in her debt."

-- From Charles Wuorinen's Foreword to Peyser's 1999 book To Boulez and Beyond: music in Europe since the Rite of Spring.

Schoenberg on Ives

There is a great Man living in this Country – a composer.  He has solved the problem how to preserve one's self-esteem and to learn.  He responds to negligence by contempt.  He is not forced to accept praise or blame.  His name is Ives.

– Arnold Schoenberg
quoted in Henry & Sydney Cowell,

Charles Ives and His Music (OUP, 1955) 

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Kandinsky on Schoenberg

Kandinsky Black Spot
oil on canvas
1912

Almost alone in severing himself from conventional beauty is the Austrian composer, Arnold Schönberg. He says in his Harmonielehre: "Every combination of notes, every advance is possible, but I am beginning to feel that there are also definite rules and conditions which incline me to the use of this or that dissonance."  This means that Schönberg realizes that the greatest freedom of all, the freedom of an unfettered art, can never be absolute. Every age achieves a certain measure of this freedom, but beyond the boundaries of its freedom the mightiest genius can never go. But the measure of freedom of each age must be constantly enlarged. Schönberg is endeavouring to make complete use of his freedom and has already discovered gold mines of new beauty in his search for spiritual harmony. His music leads us into a realm where musical experience is a matter not of the ear but of the soul alone--and from this point begins the music of the future.

~ Wassily Kandinsky         

Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911)         

tr. Michael T. H. Sadler (1914)         

Wassily Kandinsky ca.1913

What Schoenberg taught me (... partial list)

Difference between playing with the rules and following the rules.
Difference between pattern and mold.
Difference between process and procedure.



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