Poor old Schoenberg. I can’t think of a figure in the entire Western Art Music canon that’s as universally vilified. Inherited wisdom seems to be that he’s single-handedly responsible for ruining music’s capacity to be pretty, sending music down a rabbit-warren equal parts cerebral and ugly.
As far as I understand, people’s big gripe with Schoenberg seems to be his having developed a new system of composition – the twelve-tone technique - that didn’t adhere to traditional tonality. Rather than the musical materials being organised according to a hierarchy in which the circle of fifths governs the structure of the music, he created a new system in which each of the twelve notes of the chromatic scale was as important as the other, and related only to one another.
This is all well and good, if you’re a musicologist. If you’re like me, what matters more is how it sounds and indeed, how it feels. Fortunately, no matter how much musical jargon is thrown at him, Schoenberg delivers on both counts. So, as part of my lifelong Schoenbergevangelism, here are four reasons (of many) why he deserves a shot.