Customer Reviews

Constructive Dissonance: Arnold Schoenberg and the Transformations of Twentieth-Century Culture

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This is a collection of academic papers from a conference held at the University of Southern California in 1991. Unfortunately they are mainly of no interest beyond specialists, and the book certainly does not live up to its ambitious and intriguing subtitle. It might more accurately have been called "Schoenberg and the Transformations of Musicological Hermeneutics."

The papers are divided into three sections -- Contexts, which looks at how Schoenberg was affected by his social context, Creations, which examines specific aspects of Schoenberg's music, and Connections, which looks at what effect Schoenberg had on the world. The third section is where "Transformations of 20th Century Culture" might be identified -- how Schoenberg's atonality and serialism, revolutionary or purist or neoclassicist ideas affected modern culture -- but this is totally absent. Instead we have insular examinations of Schoenberg from a postmodern standpoint. Disappointing and dull.

The one excellent essay, by Leon Botstein, founding director of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, is a fascinating look at Schoenberg's position in avant-garde intellectual circles in Vienna. Botstein describes two rival factions, one centered on Gustav Klimt, and one centered on Karl Kraus. Schoenberg was active in the Kraus circle, which "believed in art as a profound instrument of ethical and moral transformation," saw that "modernism needed to be a critique of culture," and advocated "truth-telling" as opposed to what it saw as the other faction's "facile bohemianism."

Given Adorno's advocacy of Schoenberg, and given the retreat of much postmodernism into moral relativism and facile bohemianism, a book that truly addressed the effect of Schoenberg and the Second Vienna School on 20th century culture would be well worth reading!