SCHOENBERG: Why He Matters, by Harvey SachsIn 1955 Henry Pleasants, a critic of both popular and classical music, issued a cranky screed of a book, “The Agony of Modern Music,” which opened with the implacable verdict that “serious music is a dead art.” Pleasants’s thesis was that the traditional forms of classical music — opera, oratorio, orchestral and chamber music, all constructions of a bygone era — no longer related to the experience of our modern lives. Composers had lost touch with the currents of popular taste, and popular music, with its vitality and its connection to the spirit of the times, had dethroned the classics. One could still love classical music, but only with the awareness that it was a relic of the past and in no way representative of our contemporary experience. While Pleasants’s signaling the ascendance of popular music was right, much of the rest of “The Agony of Modern Music” was fallacious, not least its way of according value to a work of art based on the size of its audience. And for a large part of its public, no composer is more emblematic of that persistent feeling of alienation between composer and listener than Arnold Schoenberg.

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Persons: SCHOENBERG, Harvey Sachs, Henry Pleasants, ”, Composers, Beethoven, Verdi, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Arnold Schoenberg, “ Schoenberg, ” Sachs, Toscanini, Sachs, Schoenberg, — Locations: obscurantism