12-tone music

One hears a good deal of 12-tone music these days, which I hope is not an augury in this world of vicious division and conflict.

This music really grooves, make no mistake about that, but as with most 12-tone music, you never quite know just where it is going to go.

Thus, whatever a middlebrow audience in the middle of the 20th century may have enjoyed watching, hearing,or reading, it acknowledged that it should know third-stream jazz or the 12-tone music of Schonberg when it heard it; that it should have an opinion about what, if anything, happened in a film like Last Year at Marienbad; that it should appreciate pointed eventlessness in the plays of Samuel Beckett (or even the impossibility of drama in the films of Michelangelo Antonioni); that it should understand why New York painters were attempting to achieve absolute flatness; and that it should sample the latest efforts of European writers to produce the New Novel.

She says the composer Arnold Schonberg once told her that if he had not developed 12-tone music, someone else would have, and that his work was a natural and historical extension of Mahler's.

Although he emphasizes the importance of the Schoenberg/Stravinsky dichotomy and the tremendous influence of Webern on post-WWII composers, there is surprisingly little 12-tone music in the series.

He adapted Arnold Schoenberg's 12-tone music into a tonal idiom of his own.

The masses were Them; we were the New Aristocracy, who could read Ezra Pound and listen to 12-tone music.