Striving for liberation
I strive for: complete liberation from all forms
from all symbols
of cohesion and
of logic.
Thus:
away with 'motivic working out'.
Away with harmony as
cement or bricks of a building.
Harmony is expression
and nothing else.
Then:
Away with Pathos!
Away with protracted ten-ton scores, from erected or constructed
towers, rocks and other massive claptrap.
My music must be
brief.
Concise! In two notes: not built, but 'expressed'!!
And the results I wish for:
no stylized and sterile protracted emotion.
People are not like that:
it is impossible for a person to have only one sensation at a time.
One has thousands simultaneously. And these thousands can no
more readily be added than an apple and a pear. They go
their own ways.
And this variegation, this multifariousness, this illogicality which
our senses demonstrate, the illogicality presented by their interactions,
set forth by some mounting rush of blood, by some reaction of the
senses or the nerves, this I should like to have in my music.
It should be an expression of feeling, as our feelings, which bring
us in contact with our subconscious,really are, and no false
child of feelings and "conscious logic."
-Arnold Schoenberg to Ferrucio Busoni 1909
