Arnold Schoenberg · section 1 of 30

Preface

I learned this book from my pupils.

When I taught, I never tried merely to tell the pupil “what I know.” If anything, I tried to tell him what he did not know. Yet even that was not the main thing, although it already obliged me to invent something new for each pupil. Rather, I tried to show him the nature of the subject from its foundations. For that reason I never had those rigid rules that so carefully tighten their snares around a pupil’s mind. Everything became guidance, no more binding on the pupil than on the teacher. If the pupil can do better without the guidance, let him do without it. But the teacher must have the courage to make a fool of himself. He must appear not as the infallible man who knows everything and never errs, but as the tireless man who is always searching and perhaps sometimes finds something. Why wish to be a demigod? Why not rather be fully human?

I have never persuaded my pupils that I am infallible—only a “professor of singing” needs that. Instead, I have often risked saying things I later retracted, and giving directions which proved false when applied and which I later had to improve. My errors may not have benefited the pupil, but they scarcely did him much harm; my admitting them openly may have given him something to think about. For me, however, since I was offering untested ideas of my own, the error that soon appeared compelled a fresh examination and a better formulation.

That is how this book came into being. From the mistakes my pupils made because my directions were insufficient or wrong, I learned to give the right directions. Successful solutions confirmed the soundness of my experiment without tempting me into the delusion that I had thereby really solved the problem. And I think neither of us fared badly. Had I merely told them what I know, they would know only that and no more. As it is, they may even know less. But they know what matters: searching!

I hope my pupils will search! For they will know that one searches in order to search. Finding may be the aim, but it can easily become the end of striving.

Our age searches for many things. Above all, however, it has found one thing: comfort. Comfort spreads its full bulk even into the world of ideas and makes us more comfortable than we ought ever to be. People understand better than ever how to make life pleasant. They solve problems to get an inconvenience out of the way. But how do they solve them? And how can they even think they have solved them? This shows most clearly the condition on which comfort depends: superficiality. It is easy to have a “worldview” when one looks only at what is pleasant and does not spare a glance for the rest. The rest—that is, the main thing. It would show that, although these worldviews fit their wearers as if made to measure, the motives composing them arise chiefly from the desire to exonerate oneself. For, strangely enough, the people of our age who establish new moral laws—or, preferably, overthrow old ones—cannot live with guilt! Comfort, however, has no thought of self-discipline, so guilt is rejected or elevated into a virtue. To anyone looking closely, that expresses an acknowledgment of guilt as guilt. The thinker who searches does the opposite. He shows that problems exist and that they are unsolved. Like Strindberg: “life makes everything ugly.” Or Maeterlinck: “three quarters of our brothers are condemned to misery.” Or Weininger and all the others who have thought seriously.

Comfort as a worldview! As little movement as possible, no disturbance. Those who love comfort so much will never search where there is no certainty of finding something.

There is a puzzle in which three metal tubes of unequal diameters, enclosed in a glass-covered box, must be slipped inside one another. One can try methodically; that usually takes a very long time. But there is another way: shake at random until they come together. Is that chance? It looks like it, but I do not believe so. A thought lies behind it: movement alone can bring about what deliberation cannot. Is it not the same with the learner? What does the teacher achieve through method? At most, movement—if things go well! But they can also go badly, and then he produces rigidity. Rigidity produces nothing. Only movement is productive. Why not begin with movement straight away? But comfort!? It avoids movement, without setting out to search instead.

One must do one or the other. Whether movement leads to searching or searching to movement is immaterial. Only movement produces what one could truly call education: cultivation, thorough development. The teacher who never grows excited because he merely says “what he knows” also demands too little effort from his pupils. The movement must begin with him; his restlessness must pass to his pupils. Then they will search as he does. Then he will not disseminate “education,” and that is good. For education today means knowing a little about everything without understanding anything. The meaning of this beautiful word is different, however; since it now denotes something contemptible, it should be replaced by cultivation and thorough development.

It would then be clear that the teacher’s first task is to shake the pupil up thoroughly. When the resulting turmoil settles, everything has probably found its proper place.

Or it never does!

The movement that goes out from the teacher in this way returns to him. In this sense too I learned this book from my pupils. And I must take the opportunity to thank them.

I must thank some of them in another sense as well: those who helped me with the work through proofreading and the like; through approval, which gave me pleasure; and through opposition, which gave me energy but also drew my attention to shortcomings. They are Alban Berg, who compiled the subject index; Dr. Karl Horwitz; Dr. Heinrich Jalowetz; Karl Linke; Dr. Robert Neumann; Josef Polnauer; Erwin Stein; and Dr. Anton von Webern. Some of them will soon be heard of on better occasions.

And so perhaps this movement too will one day return to me.

Vienna, July 1911