Re: The historical roots of Schoenberg's folly

--- In crazy_music@y..., xed@e... wrote:
/crazy_music/topicId_unknown.html#562

> FROM: mclaren
> TO: new practical microtonality group
> DATE: Thu Jul 19, 2001 2:18 am GMT
> SUBJECT: The historical roots of Schoenberg's folly
>
> ...
>
> Notice how much more thorough this kind of scholarship is,
> Joe, compared to your scholarship. You confine yourself to
> Schoenberg's writings. I discuss precursors, influences,
> causes, effects, problems in reasoning and lack of evidence
> that led one music theorist to try to improve on the work
> of other music theorists.

Yes, this is all true. You have done an admirable job of
citing historical sources in support of your argument, and
I thank for summing it up here the way you did.

BUT... as I have already made clear in my posts, and as
you have still failed to address, my intention in this
debate was *not* to argue your points, but rather to correct
your incorrect and incomplete knowledge of the theoretical
writings and ideas of Schoenberg himself, thus my confinement
to quoting only his work.

> And this explains much of the garbled hesitant
> contradictory nature of Schoenberg's prose.
> Some of the garbled contradictory quality of
> Schoenberg's writing of course comes from the fact
> that Schoenberg was simple grossly incompetent as
> a writer.

The nature of Schoenberg's prose is best explained by his
intense admiration of Karl Kraus, publisher of _Die Fackel_.
Read some of Kraus's work and you will immediately see
the resemblance.

> Clear and concise writing involves getting
> rid of the embedded clauses. It involves throwing
> out the incessant qualifiers and "somewhat"s and "in part"s
> and "on the one hand"s and "even if"s. These kinds
> of incessant qualifiers, like parasitic vines choking
> a tree to death, tell us that the person who wrote
> the sentence could not decide what he actually wanted
> to say. A person who constantly festoons his sentences
> with unnecessary qualifiers like "even if" and "in
> part" is telling us that he cannot make up his mind
> which arguments he considers valid, or which facts he
> actually believes in.

Exactly. You have no argument from me on that at all.
The reason Schoenberg wrote like this is because he
thought like this. (No, I'm not psychic... but I have
read numerous accounts of his statements and behavior
when he was in the presence of people such as Mahler;
that's how I know what he was thinking.)

Schoenberg tended to look at ideas from every possible
angle, and generally could not bring himself to believe
that there was only "one true" perspective.

> You claim, Joe, that I "attempt to `dominate the list'
> with posts that are much longer than what many people here
> are interested in reading [citation: this list's archives],
> and you have bombarded the Files section with up to 10 or
> so new mp3's at a time [citation: this list's archives].
> "And lest you respond by claiming that I'm `attacking'
> you, I'm not."
>
> *Of* *course* you are attacking me, Joe.
> Please. Your nose is lengthening again.
> That Pinocchio problem you've got, Joe....have to watch that.

Brian, please explain to me why you consider this to be an
attack. I paintakingly assembled the statistics of the volume
of kilobytes posted to this list over a 7-week period including
the 2 weeks since you have joined. I even made a graph of
the volume of posts and pointed out how much was by you, how
much was by me, and how much was by everyone else. This is
simply the facts, and the facts show that you have posted
*far* more kilobytes to the list in a much shorter period of
time than anyone else here. Where's the attack?

And to my continual exhortation: "Citations, please! -
*I* don't believe this" or "*I* don't do this":

What I'm obviously (at least I thought it was obvious)
looking for here is not more citations which explain what
"JI moonies" or "musical modernist Branch Davidians" are,
or that they exist, but rather, citations from *my own work*
which demonstrate that I do in fact subscribe to these two
"belief systems". You have not provided a single one, and
you can't, because I don't, and it's very easy to find
numerous examples in my writings and sound-files which prove
that I don't.

I have done research and composed in just-intonation,
meantone, various equal-temperaments (including 12-, 19-, 22-,
31-, 55-, 72-, and 318-EDO), and other systems that are less
easy to label in such a neat mathematical way (such as Robin
Perry's "Just-about Intonation").

So please refrain from putting me into categories into which
I do not belong. Thanks.

-monz