Raw Material: Schoenberg II

It is a category error to try to refute a narcissist. Nothing that they say is about what it appears to be about. Rather, it is an allegory for some aspect of themselves.

Narcissism is itself a category error, because oneself is not the right thing to think about; but this, if it is not taught from earliest infancy, cannot be taught remedially in later life. So we could not refute Schoenberg, even were he (contra Boulez) alive, by pointing out that he was wrong either about the historical development of music or about himself.

But we may pay him the fairly high compliment that he was interestingly wrong. If we take his own words and practice at face value, then we must also adopt his erroneous post-facto justifications for them. But once we see that he was wrong, we can then see why he was wrong, and much light is shed upon the practices of his models, his followers, and his competitors.

The key work in this regard is Verklärte Nacht, where we see the emergence of serialism independently of either

1. the equal status of the 12 members of the equal-tempered collection, or

2. the suppression of harmonic contrast ("emancipation of the dissonance")

(NB. The suppression of harmonic contrast and the suppression of harmonic function are not the same thing.)