Schoenberg Quotes

• Schoenberg is too melodious for me, too sweet.

  Bertolt Brecht

  Sweet, Musical

  53 Copy quote

• In fact, the influence of Schoenberg may be overwhelming on his followers, but the significance of his art is to be identified with influences of a more subtle kind - not the system, but the aesthetic, of his art. I am quite conscious of the fact that my Chansons madécasses are in no way Schoenbergian, but I do not know whether I ever should have been able to write them had Schoenberg never written.

  Maurice Ravel

  Art, Writing, Should Have

  "Ravel: Man and Musician". Book by Arbie Orenstein, p. 126, 1975.

  20 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think there's just been this "thing" that's developed, this way that we have of talking about our music that alienates people. And I fall into that too! I learned that in graduate school. You just talk about your music in a specific way, and that separates people from you. But some composers like that. Schoenberg liked that. He wanted to feel that he was making music for an elite few. That's fine for him, but I want to set myself free from that sort of attitude.

  Missy Mazzoli

  Attitude, Fall, School

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Life, Sunday, Two

  13 Copy quote

• After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, ‘In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony.’  I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony.  He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass.  I said, ‘In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.’

  John Cage

  Wall, Writing, Order

  43 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Men, Ears

  7 Copy quote

• [Charlie "Bird" Parker] would sit down and ask [Phil Wood], "What do you think about this whole secondary Viennese school with Schoenberg, Berg and Webern? Are you listening to that music and what do you feel about it?" These were the conversations that he was having. And he also said, what he learned from Charlie Parker was, not that he studied with him in the formal sense, is that the first thing that Charlie Parker would always ask was, "Did you eat today?".

  Jon Gordon

  School, Thinking, Bird

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Thinking, Sitting, Done

  "Dirty Projectors". Interview with Brandon Stosuy, pitchfork.com. July 2, 2012.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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 Adorno

  Historical, Might, Wealth

  Theodor Adorno, Richard Leppert, Susan H. Gillespie (2002). “Essays on Music”, p.148, Univ of California Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Class, Tone, Twelve

  "The Listening Composer". Book by George Perle, p. 98, 1990.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Why is Schoenberg's Music so Hard to Understand?

  Alban Berg

  Hard

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Mistake, Writing, Years

  John Cage (2011). “Silence: Lectures and Writings, 50th Anniversary Edition”, Wesleyan University Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I certainly had no feeling for harmony, and Schoenberg thought that that would make it impossible for me to write music. He said, 'You'll come to a wall you won't be able to get through.' So I said, 'I'll beat my head against that wall.'

  John Cage

  Wall, Writing, Feelings

  Observer magazine Interview, 1982.

  20 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Life, Together, Way

  4 Copy quote

• You can't expect someone born into a family with no music...to understand when I'm conducting the Schönberg Variations.

  Daniel Barenboim

  Variation, Conducting, Born

  "'Europe has to take the initiative now'". Interview with Luke Harding, www.theguardian.com. November 30, 2004.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source