JOURNAL OF OF RESEARCH ONLINE MusicA JOURNALA JOURNAL OF OF THE THE MUSIC UNIVERSITY COUNCIL OF OF ADELAIDE AUSTRALIA t ‘WHERE POWERS ARE BOLDLY STIRRING, I COUNSEL OPEN War’: ARNOLD SCHOEN- BERG AND MUSIC CRITICISM t is commonplace to contemplate Arnold Schoenberg, the putative father of ALEXANDER CARPENTER modern music, as the subject of music criticism, much of it staunchly negative. It is well-known that Schoenberg’s entire biography is coloured by his oppositional ■ Iorientation towards music critics and criticism: indeed, the title of this article comes Fine Arts and Humanities from Schoenberg’s (1909b/1975) bellicose essay, ‘About Music Criticism’, in which University of Alberta he damns those Viennese critics who prejudge music and who even disrupt or seek Augustana Campus to have performances stopped before a work can have a fair hearing. Over the 4901-46 Avenue course of his professional life, Schoenberg responded to critics and criticism in a number of different ways. First, he fired back, writing letters and essays defending his Camrose, Alberta music but also challenging not only the credentials of critics but the very institution Canada T4V 2R3 of music criticism itself. Second, he painted, literally painted, music critics in rather unflattering terms, representing on canvas what he considered their worst qualities in a series of amateur expressionistic paintings from the early part of the twentieth
[email protected] century. And third, he withdrew himself and the modern music he championed into the Society for Private Musical Performance. Most importantly, Schoenberg also penned what I would consider his own music criticism: offering prescriptions for performance and interpretation, proposing a process for journalistic music criticism, musing on musical aesthetics generally and writing critical essays on the significance of specific composers.