Word: schoenberg
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...groups of albino rats at a Texas Tech University laboratory were given some musical entertainment. One group of newborn rat pups was exposed to selections from Mozart-The Magic Flute, Symphonies 40 and 41, the Violin Concerto No. 5. A second group audited an equivalent daily dose of Arnold Schoenberg-Pierrot Lunaire, Verkldrte Nacht and Kol Nidre, among other compositions. The third set of rats, appointed as a control, heard nothing but the whirring of a ventilation...
...this calculated bombardment, the three colonies were granted a 15-day respite from all music. Then they entered cages which allowed them, by tripping electric circuits, to opt either for Mozart or Schoenberg -in both cases, compositions they had not heard before-or to listen to nothing but the fan. The results should be encouraging to Mozart buffs. The rats exposed to his music during their compulsory concerts overwhelmingly tuned in on him. The group indoctrinated by Schoenberg split almost evenly between him and Mozart-as did the control group, which was unfamiliar with both composers...
...prove how terrible atonalism is, but to see whether animals that seldom make much noise themselves could respond to the arranged sounds that humans know as music. Cross, who happens to prefer Mozart himself, has an explanation of why the rats agreed with his musical tastes. Schoenberg, the father of serial music, wrote works of extraordinarily complex harmonies and rhythms; in behaviorist jargon, his music is dense with "information bits." Mozart used the traditional chromatic scale and a regular, readily identifiable beat. To a novice listener, and perhaps to a rat as well, Schoenberg may sound too cacophonic. Mozart might...
THERE HAS been an everlasting sad waste of energy in wrongly viewing twelve-tone music as satanic chaos perpetrated by diabolic madmen solely toward the death of music. It is true that the danger of Schoenberg's techniques is their elegant simplicity. In the hands of a master they can be a revelatory means to expression, while in the grip of an ordinary musical merchant they can depreciate into rococo pyrotechnics, vapid and uncommunicative. The calumny heaped upon Schoenberg is disgraceful. He sought not to create "modern" music but to allow music to speak her feelings in the modern...
...wishing to fulfill the logic of dense twelve-tone organization, represented by such composers as Milton Babbitt and Pierre Boulez, and those desiring to create music with the least possible constraints, represented by Cage and Stockhausen. The latter reacted against the old ghosts of Kingsor and Vienna, Wagner and Schoenberg himself. The new principle was that the legitimacy of music flows simply from the auditor's effort to feel sheer sounds. Music is the sensitized constancy of the world's masses. To borrow a term from language studies, music is mimetic; it imitates life as it strives to express...