Schoenberg Quotes

Music is only understood when one goes away singing it and only loved when one falls asleep with it in one's head, and finds it still there on waking up the next morning. ~ Arnold Schoenberg

(Schoenberg himself, however, had no time for Adorno, complaining of his 'pomposity' and 'oily pathos', ~ Tom Service

I have never seen faces, but because I have looked people in the eye, only their gazes. ~ Arnold Schoenberg

There are no more geniuses, only critics. ~ Arnold Schoenberg

My work should be judged as it enters the ears and heads of listeners, not as it is described to the eyes of readers. ~ Arnold Schoenberg

Because essentially Schoenberg was an extremely gifted man. And in spite of many of his theories and so on, when he really began to write music, he still was guided very much by his internal hearing, by what we call your internal ear. ~ Leo Ornstein

I never was very capable of expressing my feelings or emotions in words. I don't know whether this is the cause why I did it in music and also why I did it in painting. Or vice versa: That I had this way as an outlet. I could renounce expressing something in words. ~ Arnold Schoenberg

You cannot expect the Form before the Idea,For they will come into being together. ~ Arnold Schoenberg

I put together the influences of my life in as clear a way as I possibly can, in the same way that Beethoven or Schoenberg or Bach put their influences together. ~ John Zorn

I am the slave of an internal power more powerful than my education. ~ Arnold Schoenberg

Chris hurried after him. 'It's so hard to believe we just travelled hundreds of light years.'
'Why?' asked the Doctor.
'I always understood that you cannot travel faster than light,' said Chris.
'Says who?'
'Says Einstein,' said Chris.
'What?' The Doctor stopped and put an arm around Chris's shoulder. 'Do you understand Einstein?'
Chris wasn't sure where this was going. 'Yes.'
'What?' gasped the Doctor. 'And quantum theory?'
'Yes,' said Chris. He basked in the Doctor's astonishment, on firmer ground at last.
'What?' gasped the Doctor. 'And Planck?'
'Yes,' said Chris.
'What?' gasped the Doctor. 'And Newton?'
'Yes!' said Chris.
'What?' gasped the Doctor. 'And Schoenberg?'
Chris paused. Was it a trick question? He recalled reading about the crisis of tonality. He thought he'd caught most of it, so he answered proudly, 'Yes. Of course.'
The Doctor whistled, apparently impressed. Then he said, 'You've got an awful lot to unlearn, Bristol. ~ Gareth Roberts

If ... [Alban] Berg departs so radically from tradition, through his substitution of a symmetrical partitioning of the octave for the asymmetrical partionings of the major/minor system, he departs just as radically from the twelve-tone tradition that is represented in the music of Schoenberg and Webern, for whom the twelve-tone series was always an integral structure that could be transposed only as a unit, and for whom twelve-tone music always implied a constant and equivalent circulation of the totality of pitch classes. ~ George Perle

On Sunday 8 April 1945, he had just finished conducting a service of worship at Schoenberg, when two soldiers came took him away. As he left, he said to another prisoner, This is the end - but for me, the beginning - of life. He was hanged the next day, less than a week before the Allies reached the camp. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

It is noted that from 1967 to 1995 essays on negative emotions far outnumbered those on positive emotions in the psychological literature. The ratio was 21:1. Even those supreme perpetrators of pop nihilism, The New York Times and The Washington Post, have a better ratio than psychological literature. They average 12 negative stories to every one that might be construed to be non-negative. Many of their non-negative stories, however, cover success in sports and entertainment.

I demand that the purveyors of despair who pretend to be dispassionate observes of the human condition go ahead and disclose that the 10 most beautiful words in the English languages are chimes, dawn, golden, hush, lullaby, luminous, melody, mist, murmuring, and tranquil; that Java sparrows prefer the music of Back over that of Schoenberg; that math experts have determined there are 1/96 trillion ways to lace up your shoes; that the Inuit term for making love is translated as 'laughing together in bed;' and that according to Buckminster Fuller, "pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting. ~ Rob Brezsny

Rests always sound well. ~ Arnold Schoenberg

Early mornings were given over to Bartok and Schoenberg. Midmorning I treated myself to the vocals of Billy Eckstine, Billie Holiday, Nat Cole, Louis Jordan and Bull Moose Jackson. A piroshki from the Russian delicatessen next door was lunch and then the giants of bebop flipped through the air. Charlie Parker and Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughan and Al Haig and Howard McGhee. Blues belonged to late afternoons and the singers' lyrics of lost love spoke to my solitude. ~ Maya Angelou

You think about, like, [20th-century classical composers] Alban Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern sitting around in some living room in Vienna and being like, "We are the end of music. We are the end of this tradition. Music is done." ~ David Longstreth

Schoenberg is too melodious for me, too sweet. ~ Bertolt Brecht

They [the critics] deal with Schoenberg's early works and all their wealth by classifying them, with the music-historical cliché, as late romantic post-Wagnerian. One might just as well dispose of Beethoven as a late-classicist post-Haydnerian. ~ Theodor W. Adorno

As early as 1930 Schoenberg wrote: "Radio is an enemy, a ruthless enemy marching irresistibly forward, and any resistance is hopeless"; it "force-feeds us music . . . regardless of whether we want to hear it, or whether we can grasp it," with the result that music becomes just noise, a noise among other noises. Radio was the tiny stream it all began with. Then came other technical means for reproducing, proliferating, amplifying sound, and the stream became an enormous river. If in the past people would listen to music out of love for music, nowadays it roars everywhere and all the time, "regardless whether we want to hear it," it roars from loudspeakers, in cars, in restaurants, in elevators, in the streets, in waiting rooms, in gyms, in the earpieces of Walkmans, music rewritten, reorchestrated, abridged, and stretched out, fragments of rock, of jazz, of opera, a flood of everything jumbled together so that we don't know who composed it (music become noise is anonymous), so that we can't tell beginning from end (music become noise has no form): sewage-water music in which music is dying. ~ Milan Kundera

I was never revolutionary. The only revolutionary in our time was Strauss! ~ Arnold Schoenberg

In his late quartets, Beethoven introduces an element that shouldn't be there, that should be left for meditation, though I love them. I can see that through them came Wagner and Mahler and Schoenberg and Berg. And then came Tracey Emin. And I can see it all as one downward path. ~ John Tavener

One day when I was studying with Schoenberg, he pointed out the eraser on his pencil and said, 'This end is more important than the other.' After twenty years I learned to write directly in ink. ~ John Cage

Great art presupposes the alert mind of the educated listener ~ Arnold Schoenberg

Composing is a slowed-down improvisation; often one cannot write fast enough to keep up with the stream of ideas. ~ Arnold Schoenberg

Although our "gentle air" cannot improve the way hate and envy look, it does seem not to encourage firmness and decision. All is compromise; caution and refinement are everywhere. Everything has to "make a good impression" - whether or not it is any good: the impression is the main thing. ~ Arnold Schoenberg

If it is art, it is not for all.
If it is for all, it is not art. ~ Schoenberg

of dark passageways, their footsteps echoing. Schoenberg ~ Anne-Marie O'Connor

My music is not modern, it is merely badly played ~ Arnold Schoenberg