And it is he one encounters almost solely in the music of the third
period, the enigmatical little pieces for orchestra and piano. It is he
who has emerged victorious from the duel revealed by the D-minor
Quartet. Those grotesque and menacing little works are lineally
descended from the intellectualized passages of the great preceding one,
are, indeed, a complete expression of the theoretical processes which
called them into being. For while in the quartet the scholasticism
appears to have been superimposed upon a body of musical ideas, in the
works of the last period it appears well-nigh the generative principle.
These latter have all the airlessness, the want of poetry, the frigidity
of things constructed after a formula, daring and brilliant though that
formula is. They make it seem as though Schoenberg had, through a
process of consideration and thought and study, arrived at the
conclusion that the music of the future would, in the logic of things,
take such and such a turn, that tonality as it is understood was doomed
to disappear, that part-writing would attain a new independence, that
new conceptions of harmony would result, that rhythm would attain a new
freedom through the influence of the new mechanical body of man, and had
proceeded to incorporate his theories in tone.
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