Top 39 Schoenberg's 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. 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
#3. 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
#4. You cannot expect the Form before the Idea,For they will come into being together.
Arnold Schoenberg
#5. I am the slave of an internal power more powerful than my education.
Arnold Schoenberg
#6. 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
#7. I have never seen faces, but because I have looked people in the eye, only their gazes.
Arnold Schoenberg
#8. You can't expect someone born into a family with no music ... to understand when I'm conducting the Schoenberg Variations.
Daniel Barenboim
#9. In his late quartets, Beethoven introduces an element that shouldn't be there, that should be left for meditation, though I love them. I can see that through them came Wagner and Mahler and Schoenberg and Berg. And then came Tracey Emin. And I can see it all as one downward path.
John Tavener
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. (Schoenberg himself, however, had no time for Adorno, complaining of his 'pomposity' and 'oily pathos',
Tom Service
#13. 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
#18. In Spring! In the creation of art it must be as it is in Spring!
Arnold Schoenberg
#19. Schoenberg came to the crisis of modernism from a standpoint diametrically opposed to that of Schenker and Tovey: not with his finger in the dyke but with his whole frame spreadeagled on a board swept along by the surf of history.
Joseph Kerman
#20. 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
#21. Why is Schoenberg's Music so Hard to Understand?
Alban Berg
#22. 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
#23. 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
#25. I was never revolutionary. The only revolutionary in our time was Strauss!
Arnold Schoenberg
#26. Beethoven, Schubert, Schoenberg, Berg imply a type of pianist who is intellectual. That's not always associated with female soloists.
Jeffrey Tate
#27. 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
#29. 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
#32. If music is frozen architecture, then the potpourri is frozen coffee-table gossip ... Potpourri is the art of adding apples to pears ...
Arnold Schoenberg
#33. 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
#34. If it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art.
Arnold Schoenberg
#35. Composing is a slowed-down improvisation; often one cannot write fast enough to keep up with the stream of ideas.
Arnold Schoenberg
#36. If it is art, it is not for all.
If it is for all, it is not art.
Schoenberg
#37. [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
#38. 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
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