Metaphysical Materials: Schoenberg in Our Time

Abstract

Two Critical Forum contributions to Music Analysis in 2015 testified to the continuing scholarly concern with Schoenberg's musical thinking, and particularly with the possible connections and disconnections between tonality and the twelve‐note method. This response revisits the materials surveyed in 2015 and adds further references in order to underline the special circumstances of Schoenberg's move from Europe to North America, the profound tensions of a career divided between teaching and composing, and the consequences of not separating thinking about music from thinking about religion – the material from the metaphysical.