… compounded in historical determinism, organicism, occultism, solipsism …
This is from ‘The Poietic Fallacy’ (2004) found in The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays by Richard Taruskin (2009):
… there is simply no point in maintaining the pretense that Schoenberg’s music is music like any other music. More than any other body of music that I know, it represented a crux in the history of ideas. That does indeed make it (and him) supremely important.
[line break added] But that history has been largely forgotten, and (as Santayana might have warned us) its repercussions linger even into our shiny new post-modern millennium. We must do a better job of comprehending the sources of Schoenberg’s “inner compulsion” — and of the poietic fallacy, too — if we want to escape from them, or even accept them in full, free consciousness.
… Looking at Schoenberg through the prism of the poietic fallacy makes it possible, even at this incredibly late date, to contend (and even believe) that the only thing militating against the widespread acceptance of his art is its novelty.
[line break added] On the contrary: its greatest obstacle is the exceedingly old-fashioned, even outmoded, esthetic — compounded in historical determinism, organicism, occultism, solipsism — that so obviously informs it, along with a host of hoary elitist and sexist clichés, and a megadose of the jargon of authenticity.
… When all of that is done; when Schoenberg is placed in proper perspective as one of the twentieth century’s most powerful musical minds, but also one of its most eccentric; and when the poietic fallacy at last gives way to a view of “serious” music that takes adequate account of its function as a communicative medium, then such music (Schoenberg’s, to be sure, but far more important, our own contemporary concert music) may once again — perhaps eventually — become one of the arts that matter.
My most recent post from Taruskin’s book is here.
-Julie
Coloring 