Schoenberg Music Quotes & Sayings

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

Lucidity is the first purpose of color in music. — Arnold Schoenberg

You can't expect someone born into a family with no music ... to understand when I'm conducting the Schoenberg Variations. — Daniel Barenboim

My parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that would never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension. — J.K. Rowling

There is still plenty of good music to be written in C major. — Arnold Schoenberg

The god of dirt came up to me many times and said so many wise and delectable things, I lay on the grass listening to his dog voice, frog voice; now, he said, and now, and never once mentioned forever from, One or Two Things — Mary Oliver

Experience is like a comb that life gives you when you are bald. — Navjot Singh Sidhu

We cannot agree that an act of plunder which threatens the livelihood of many nations should be allowed to succeed. — Anthony Eden

If ... [Alban] Berg departs so radically from tradition, through his substitution of a symmetrical partitioning of the octave for the asymmetrical partionings of the major/minor system, he departs just as radically from the twelve-tone tradition that is represented in the music of Schoenberg and Webern, for whom the twelve-tone series was always an integral structure that could be transposed only as a unit, and for whom twelve-tone music always implied a constant and equivalent circulation of the totality of pitch classes. — George Perle

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

Conservatives sometimes catch a tremendous about of flak from inside the Beltway - and those groups can exert extreme pressure on those conservative members to try to get them to vote in ways that are opposite of their core fundamental beliefs and the promises that they made to their constituents back in their districts. — Jeff Landry

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

There is a striking feature of the twentieth century ... the musical creation of the 20th century is qualitatively different from the 18th century, in that it lacks that immediate access or short-term access that was true of the past ... I have no doubt that if we took two children of today two groups and taught one of them Mozart Haydn & Beethoven and the other Schoenberg and post Schoenbergian music, that there would be very substantial difference in their capacity to comprehend and deal with it, and that may reflect, and in fact if that's correct it would reflect, something about our innate musical capacities. — Noam Chomsky

My music is not modern, it is merely badly played — Arnold Schoenberg

In time of war, it is not enough to say, 'I am a citizen and I have rights.' One must also say, 'I am a citizen and I have obligations. — Kermit Roosevelt III

I wanted to be a dancer my whole life. And when I gave it up to act, I always had a really sad part of myself that missed it and missed performing and missed being physical in that way. — Lyndsy Fonseca

If it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art. — Arnold Schoenberg

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

Rests always sound well. — Arnold Schoenberg

[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

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

Things are always different than what they might be ... If you wait for them to change, you will never do anything. — Henry James

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

Why is Schoenberg's Music so Hard to Understand? — Alban Berg

After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, "In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony." I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, 'In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall. — John Cage

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

Love for no reason. Love with passion. — Debasish Mridha

My music is not lovely — Arnold Schoenberg

I think there's just been this "thing" that's developed, this way that we have of talking about our music that alienates people. And I fall into that too! I learned that in graduate school. You just talk about your music in a specific way, and that separates people from you. But some composers like that. Schoenberg liked that. He wanted to feel that he was making music for an elite few. That's fine for him, but I want to set myself free from that sort of attitude. — Missy Mazzoli