Arnold Schoenberg · section 3 of 30

Theory or a System of Presentation?

A person who teaches musical composition is called a teacher of theory; if he has written a book on harmony, he is even called a theorist. Yet a carpenter, who also has to teach his apprentice the craft, would not think of presenting himself as a teacher of theory. He may call himself a master carpenter, but that is more a designation of rank than a title. He certainly does not consider himself something like a scholar, although he too understands his craft. If there is a difference, it can only be that musical technique is more “theoretical” than carpentry. That is not easy to see. When a carpenter knows how to join adjoining pieces of wood securely, his knowledge rests on sound observation and experience, just as does a music theorist’s ability to connect chords effectively. When the carpenter knows which woods to use under a particular strain, he is calculating natural conditions and the properties of his material, just as a music theorist judges how long a piece may be by estimating the potential of its themes. If the carpenter adds fluting to enliven a flat surface, he shows as poor a taste and almost as little imagination as most artists, but still as much as any music theorist. If instruction in carpentry, like instruction in musical theory, rests on observation, experience, reflection and taste, on knowledge of natural laws and the conditions of the material, is there really an essential difference?

Why, then, does a master carpenter not also call himself a theorist, or a music theorist call himself a master musician? Because there is a small difference: the carpenter could never understand his craft only in theory, whereas the music theorist usually cannot do anything in practice; he is no master. And there is another difference: the true music theorist is ashamed of the craft because it belongs to others, not to him. Concealing this without making a virtue of necessity is not enough for him. The title “master” has lost its value; one might be confused with someone else. A third difference: a more distinguished profession must have a more distinguished title. Thus music, although a great artist is still addressed as “master,” has not simply instruction in a craft, as even painting does, but instruction in theory.

And the consequence: no art is so greatly hindered in its development by its teachers as music. Nobody guards his property more jealously than the person who knows that, strictly speaking, it does not belong to him. The harder ownership is to prove, the greater the effort to prove it. The theorist, who is usually not an artist or is a bad one—which amounts to a non-artist—therefore has every reason to work at securing his unnatural position. He knows that a pupil learns most from the example the masters set in their masterpieces. If one could let people watch composition as one lets them watch painting, if there could be composers’ studios as there were painters’ studios, it would become clear how superfluous the music theorist is, and that he is as harmful as the art academies. He senses this and seeks a substitute, putting theory and system in place of the living example.

I do not wish to argue against honest attempts to discover the presumed laws of art. Such efforts are necessary, above all to the striving human mind. The noblest impulse, the impulse to understand, imposes on us the duty to search. A mistaken doctrine found through honest searching still stands higher than the complacent certainty of someone who resists it because he imagines he knows—knows without having searched himself! It is precisely our duty to keep reflecting on the mysterious causes of artistic effects. But again and again, each time beginning afresh; observing for ourselves anew and trying to put things in order ourselves. Taking nothing as given except the phenomena. These have a better claim to be regarded as eternal than the laws we think we have discovered. Since we know the phenomena with certainty, we would have more right to call our knowledge of them a science than to apply that name to the conjectures intended to explain them.

Yet these conjectures too have their justification: as attempts, as results of efforts of thought, as mental exercise; perhaps sometimes even as preliminary steps toward truth.

If the theory of art were content with this and satisfied with the reward honest searching offers, there would be nothing to object to. But it wants to be more. It does not wish to be an attempt to find laws; it claims to have found the eternal laws. It observes a number of phenomena, orders them according to certain common features, and derives laws from them. This is right enough, if only because there is unfortunately hardly any other way to proceed. But here the error begins. The false conclusion is drawn that, because these laws apparently apply to phenomena observed so far, they must now apply to every future phenomenon as well. Most disastrously, people believe they have found a standard for determining the artistic value of future works of art. However often reality has discredited the theorists when they have declared unartistic whatever does not follow the course of their rules, they cannot abandon their delusion. For what would they be if they did not at least hold beauty on lease, since art itself does not belong to them? What would they be if what someone demonstrates here once again became clear to everyone for all time? What would they be, since art in reality propagates itself through works of art and not through laws of beauty? Would there really still be a difference between them and a master carpenter in their favor?

One might say that I go too far: everyone already knows that aesthetics does not prescribe laws of beauty but merely tries to infer their existence from artistic effects. Quite right: almost everyone knows that today. But hardly anyone takes it into account, which is precisely what matters. I will illustrate this with an example. I believe I have succeeded in this book in refuting some old prejudices of musical aesthetics. Their having existed until now would already sufficiently prove my assertion. But when I state what I do not regard as a necessary condition of artistic effect—when I say that tonality is not an eternal natural law of music—everyone can surely see the theorists leap up indignantly to veto my honor. Who would be willing to concede this today, even if I proved it more rigorously than I shall here?

The power the theorist needs to secure an untenable position comes from his alliance with aesthetics. Aesthetics concerns itself only with eternal things and therefore always arrives too late in life. This is called conservative. Yet it is as ridiculous as a conservative express train. The advantages aesthetics secures for the theorist, however, are too great for him to care. How ungrand it sounds when a teacher tells his pupil: tonality is one of the most rewarding means of achieving an effect of musical form. How different it sounds when he speaks of the principle of tonality as a law—“Thou shalt…”—whose observance is indispensable to every effect of musical form. That word “indispensable”: one feels a breath of eternity! Dare to feel otherwise, young artist, and all those who have long known what I demonstrate here again will be against you. They will call you “Neu-Junker-Unkraut” (roughly, “upstart weeds”) and “fraud,” and slander you: “You wanted to dupe people, to bluff.” Once they have smeared you with their malice, they will stand there as the brave men who considered it cowardly not to risk something for their opinion—something that harms only the other person. And then you are the scoundrel!

To the devil with all these theories if their only purpose is to obstruct the development of art, and if their positive contribution consists at most in helping those who would compose badly anyway to learn to do so quickly.

They do not fulfill what one might reasonably demand of them. Their practice of aesthetics is extremely primitive. They achieve little more than a few attractive phrases, while borrowing chiefly its method of categorical assertions and judgments. For example, they assert: “That sounds good or bad”—beautiful or ugly would be more accurate and honest. This is presumptuous in the first place, but it is nevertheless an aesthetic judgment. If it is stated without justification, why should anyone believe it? Should we trust the theorist’s authority? Why? When he gives no reasons, he states what he knows—that is, what he has learned rather than discovered himself—or what everyone believes because it is everyone’s experience. But beauty is not a matter of everyone’s experience, at most of the experience of individuals. Above all, if such a judgment were allowed to stand without further justification, that justification would have to follow from the system so necessarily that stating it could be dispensed with. Here we have touched the theorists’ sorest point. Their theories wish to operate as practical aesthetics: to influence the sense of beauty so that, through harmonic progressions for instance, it produces effects that can be regarded as beautiful; and to claim the right to exclude sounds and progressions considered ugly. Yet these theories are not constructed so that aesthetic evaluation follows of itself from their principles and the consistent development of those principles! On the contrary, there is no connection—absolutely none. These judgments of beauty and ugliness are entirely unmotivated excursions into aesthetics that have nothing to do with the organization of the whole. Parallel fifths sound bad—why? This passing note sounds harsh—why? Ninth chords do not exist, or sound harsh—why? Where in the system is the common basis for these three questions? The feeling for beauty? What is that? What other connection does the feeling for beauty have with this system? With this system, please!

These systems! On another occasion I shall show that they are not even properly what they could at least be: systems of presentation. Methods that divide a subject consistently, organize it clearly, and proceed from principles that secure an uninterrupted sequence. I shall show how soon such a system proves inadequate, how soon it has to be broken through and patched with a second system—which is no system at all—merely to accommodate the most familiar events after a fashion. It ought to be otherwise! A real system should above all have principles that include every event. Ideally, exactly as many events as actually exist: no more and no fewer. Natural laws are principles of this kind. Only principles that do not depend on exceptions would have a claim to universal validity, sharing that property of unconditional validity with natural laws. But the laws of art are above all full of exceptions!

I too have been unable to find such principles, and I believe they will not be found very soon. Attempts to reduce everything artistic completely to natural causes will continue to fail for a long time. The effort to discover laws of art can therefore at most achieve results like those of a good comparison: influencing how the observer’s faculties adjust to the particular features of the object observed. A comparison brings closer what is too distant, thereby enlarging details, and moves farther away what is too near, allowing an overview. No greater value than this can be assigned to laws of art today. But this is already a great deal. The attempt to construct laws of art from shared characteristics should be no more absent from a textbook of art than comparison should. Yet there should be no demand that we take such meager results for eternal laws, for something resembling laws of nature. Once again: natural laws admit no exceptions, whereas theories of art consist chiefly of exceptions. What remains can suffice if it presents itself as a teaching method, a system of presentation whose organization may be ingenious and useful for achieving the teaching goal, and whose clarity is simply clarity of presentation—not a claim to clarity about the things underlying what is presented.

At most I have aimed at a system of this kind, and I do not know whether I have achieved it. But it seems to me that I have at least succeeded in avoiding the predicament of having to concede exceptions. The system’s principles produce more possible cases than actually occur. Those systems that nevertheless fail to include all events have the same fault. I therefore have to exclude cases just as they do. But they do so through aesthetic judgments: bad-sounding, harsh, ugly, and so on. They do not use the much less pretentious and more truthful means of stating that something is merely unusual. What is truly ugly could hardly become capable of producing beauty, certainly not in the sense of these aestheticians. But what is merely unusual may become customary, though it need not. Teaching composition is thereby relieved of a responsibility it has never been able to discharge, and can confine itself to its real task: developing skills in the pupil that enable him to produce something of proven effect. It need not guarantee that the result will be new, interesting, or even beautiful. It can, however, guarantee that following its instructions can achieve something resembling the craftsmanship of older works of art, up to the point where creativity, even in technical and mechanical matters, escapes all control.

However much theorizing takes place in this book—most of it is forced on me by the need to refute false theories and to expand narrow, restrictive formulations until they include the actual events—it is always done in full awareness that I am offering only comparisons in the sense explained above: symbols. My sole purpose is to connect ideas that seem remote from one another, to aid understanding through consistency of presentation, and to stimulate and enrich thought through the many relationships of all the facts to one idea. It is not to establish new eternal laws. If I succeed in teaching a pupil the craft of our art as completely as a carpenter can always teach his craft, I shall be satisfied. And I should be proud if, varying a familiar saying, I could say: “I have taken a bad aesthetics away from students of composition and given them a good training in craftsmanship instead.”