Schoenberg's quip

CHRIS FARLEY to PAUL MCCARTNEY: Remember when you were in the Beatles ... you did that album Abbey Road ...  [where] ... the song goes "And in the end the love you take equals to the love you make"?  Remember that?
PAUL MCCARTNEY: Yes.
CHRIS FARLEY: Is that true?
The Chris Farley Show, Saturday Night Live
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A quip is not quite the same as a line of poetry, and I certainly do not intend to be funny by questioning the factual basis of  Arnold Schoenberg's often mentioned quip:

My music is not modern, it is just badly played.

What did Schoenberg have in mind when he spoke of his music as "badly played"?  Technical defects of execution, such as wrong notes, faulty intonation, or poor ensemble?  Unacceptable deviations from clearly stated instructions in the score regarding tempo, dynamics, or phrasing?

When musical America sided with Hitler and Stalin

LIFE Magazine, Nov. 22, 1943, reporting on the fee for first performance rights paid by Columbia Broadcasting Corporation for Shostakovich's Eighth Symphony

The first performance rights fee of $10,000 [1] paid in 1943 for Shostakovich's Eighth Symphony may not seem impressive in relation to a single concert fee of $3,000-4,000 commanded in the 1940s by top performers like Vladimir Horowitz and Jascha Heifetz [2].  However, when compared to the typical first performance fee of $100 paid at that time for the music of American composers [3], the Shostakovich fee seems downright astronomical.

I have never encountered an explanation of this shocking disparity, but I am sure it cannot be explained by supposing that the princely sum paid for Shostakovich's symphony was a deliberately over-generous show of support for the music's role as a symbol of  struggle against Nazism.  Such an explanation would be doubtful for at least two reasons.

SCHOENBERG: String Quartet in D minor, Op.7

After years of trying to like Schoenberg's Op.7 string quartet I still perceive it as a mildly irritating exercise in compositional excess.  Its forty five minutes densely packed with feverish thematic development, frenetic piling up of counterpoint, and restless harmonic motion simply refuse to sum up to an aesthetically rewarding experience.  (Despite a committed and technically superb performance by the Borromeo Quartet from a 2011 concert at the Jordan Hall, New England Conservatory, Boston.)
 
I even thought that perhaps "compositional excess" is an uncharitable way to describe what might be a case of compositional despair felt by a composer who wants to keep things fresh and interesting with compositional tools that have been badly worn-out by two centuries of heavy use.  What if Schoenberg's constantly varied asymmetric themes, his restlessly crisscrossing voice leading (with its constant spray of non-harmonic notes), his fluctuating rhythms, his refusal to punctuate his "musical prose" with musically meaningful pauses - what if all this is meant to divert my attention from the fact that the music's inner core consists of essentially triadic harmonies moving in familiar ways along the tonic-dominant axes of D minor and related keys?

If my guess is correct, then perhaps sympathy rather than irritation is an appropriate emotional response to Schoenberg's struggle with tonality -- the kind of sympathy one may feel for the desperate efforts of a long married couple to camouflage the boringly predicable and worn-out anatomical reality of their sex life with romantic getaways, Victoria's Secret underwear, and assorted contraptions delivered in plain wrapped parcels from Babes in Toyland...

When smart people say stupid things ...

Imagine you are a composer who is a pioneer of non-tonal music.  You already know from  violently scandalous premieres of your works that the general concert-going public is not receptive to significant doses of dissonance (at least outside opera) because it associates dissonance with psychological and physical discomfort as well as with ugliness in general.  You are convinced, however, that the public's attitude toward non-tonal music can change as a result of greater familiarity with and deeper aesthetic understanding of your compositional idiom.  So you decide that one way to promote your creative direction in composition is to come up with a catchy slogan which will sum up your aesthetic goals in a concise and attractively positive way.  And the slogan you finally settle upon is ... emancipation of dissonance. [1]

Now lets put this slogan in perspective.  You know that most people hate a certain thing with which they have a variety of strongly negative associations.  And you propose to emancipate the very thing that they hate?  As a public relations strategy this is no less doltish than it would be for gay rights advocates to employ 'emancipation of felonious sin' as the slogan which sums up the political, social, and moral aims of the gay rights movement!

Schoenberg, Boulez, and the Schrödinger's cat

Arnold Schoenberg's grave

By now the story is old and tired: Soon after Schoenberg-the-man was buried Pierre Boulez proceeded to bury Schoenberg-the-composer in the infamously cold-blooded pseudo-obituary entitled Schoenberg is dead.  Temperamentally Boulez's unceremonious postmortem of Schoenberg's creative legacy was the work of a pathologically ambitious scoundrel, if not a borderline sociopath.  Intellectually it was an exercise in musicological triviality and ideologically motivated nonsense.

Prokofiev and Schoenberg

The curse of mental associations: When I listen to Prokofiev I always feel sorry for poor Schoenberg. Both were modernists who had scandal-causing premieres in their early days, both composed into the early 1950s (when they died within 2 years of each other), yet Prokofiev departed this world as a composer with a wide public following and many recordings of his works, while Schoenberg remained the rarely performed (and rarely recorded) Bogeyman of serious music long after this death.