Arnold Schoenberg Quotes

#1. The principal function of form is to advance our understanding. It is the organization of a piece which helps the listener to keep the idea in mind, to follow its development, its growth, its elaboration, its fate.

Arnold Schoenberg

#2. 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

#3. You cannot expect the Form before the Idea,For they will come into being together.

Arnold Schoenberg

#4. I am the slave of an internal power more powerful than my education.

Arnold Schoenberg

#5. I owe very, very much to Mozart; and if one studies, for instance, the way in which I write for string quartet, then one cannot deny that I have learned this directly from Mozart. And I am proud of it!

Arnold Schoenberg

#6. I have never seen faces, but because I have looked people in the eye, only their gazes.

Arnold Schoenberg

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. My music is not lovely

Arnold Schoenberg

#11. Lucidity is the first purpose of color in music.

Arnold Schoenberg

#12. My music is not modern, it is merely badly played

Arnold Schoenberg

#13. There are no more geniuses, only critics.

Arnold Schoenberg

#14. In Spring! In the creation of art it must be as it is in Spring!

Arnold Schoenberg

#15. I find above all that the expression, atonal music, is most unfortunate - it is on a par with calling flying the art of not falling, or swimming the art of not drowning.

Arnold Schoenberg

#16. Market value is irrelevant to intrinsic value ... Unqualified judgment can at most claim to decide the market-value - a value that can be in inverse proportion to the intrinsic value.

Arnold Schoenberg

#17. Rests always sound well.

Arnold Schoenberg

#18. I was never revolutionary. The only revolutionary in our time was Strauss!

Arnold Schoenberg

#19. There is still plenty of good music to be written in C major.

Arnold Schoenberg

#20. Great art presupposes the alert mind of the educated listener

Arnold Schoenberg

#21. If music is frozen architecture, then the potpourri is frozen coffee-table gossip ... Potpourri is the art of adding apples to pears ...

Arnold Schoenberg

#22. An artistic impression is substantially the resultant of two components. One what the work of art gives the onlooker - the other, what he is capable of giving to the work of art.

Arnold Schoenberg

#23. If it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art.

Arnold Schoenberg

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

Arnold Schoenberg

#25. [If] it were possible to watch composing in the same way that one can watch painting, if composers could have _ateliers_ as did painters, then it would be clear how superfluous the music theorist is and how he is just as harmful as the art academies.

Arnold Schoenberg