Schoenberg: The Future of Symphonic Thought

Abstract

Readers who have the mixed pleasure of being familiar with different types of my writings-musicological (if I may use the phoney term for the sake of brief characterisation), analytical, and popularmay have asked themselves at some stage of temporary frustration why indeed the pleasure is mixed. The answer is jolly near to seek. Throughout my writing years, I have fought two opposite misuses of language, to wit, verbal complication and verbal simplification. Nothing that is, is either simple or complex. It is, and its simplicity or complexity depends on two variables, the standpoint whence we view it, and our own make-up and education. Now, popular writings address themselves to one specific viewpoint, the inexpert, and technical writings to another, the expert. The inexpert wants simplification, which is unjustifiable because it distorts or conceals the truth, and the expert wants complication through technical (secret) language, which is unjustifiable when it distorts or obscures the truth and so creates a superfluously professional world of thought, a cast to which the pariah, try as he may, finds no access, an esoteric circle surrounded by the barbed wire erected, by law, by Mumbo Jumbo, rather than being surrounded, as it should be, by a concentric outer circle creating an exoteric area through which the uninitiated has to pass before he can reach the true secrets-those which are shielded from misunderstanding, not those which are shielded from understanding. As an analyst, writer, speaker, and teacher, I have been deeply concerned with this two-faced problem from the outset of my attempts at communication. People and editors and publishers who wanted the