Listening to Schoenberg

I always considered Arnold Schoenberg’s 12-tone, atonal music pretentious noise. But I’ve been forced to change my mind after reading Mark Swed’s enlightening analysis (“Driven to Express Himself,” Oct. 21), which explains that Schoenberg’s ear-bangers “expressed the real complexity of experience” with “unfettered inspiration.”

I now feel about Schoenberg’s music the way Mark Twain described Wagner’s: “It’s better than it sounds.”

AL RAMUS

Pacific Palisades

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I can’t believe anybody is still tooting Schoenberg’s horn.

One has only to listen to a Beethoven symphony to realize that tonality is alive and well, and that it is serialism that was stillborn. No one has satisfactorily explained why human beings, the world over, organize music around tonal scales, any more than why we arrange it into evenly spaced measures of rhythm--but yet it’s safe to say that it connects with something deeply rooted in our psyches.

Schoenberg’s rejection of tonality is a profound act of egotism. His legacy may be a contemplatable body of sound, but it’s stripped of one of the main things that give music its meaning. Can’t we please let it die in the 20th century along with that other great affront to human nature--communism?

RANDY DAVIDSON

Santa Monica

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Fifty years after Arnold Schoenberg’s death, the composer’s 12-tone system is no longer ahead of its time. His music has always found prominent advocates from Ravel to Stokowski to the Juilliard Quartet. Schoenberg’s importance to the history of 20th century music remains secure. But those who are repelled by Schoenberg’s music don’t just scorn it, they really hate it.

What Schoenberg’s small clique of enthusiasts fails to recognize is that this revulsion is both educated and urbane. The same audience that flees the concert halls whenever his name appears enjoys related musical ideas from such diverse sources as Hildegard von Bingen and Ornette Coleman. Arnold Schoenberg developed a sophisticated compositional structure capable of conveying powerful emotion: unrelentingly excruciating emotion. A Schoenberg revival? I’d sooner hear the death squeals of a herd of walruses succumbing to Ebola.

LISE BROER

La Canada Flintridge

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Regarding Mark Swed’s use of the term “12-tone system” in his article about Arnold Schoenberg: This is a sloppy misidentity of what is really the tone row system.

Tone-row composition studiously avoids harmony in chords of notes that are sounded together, but they are the same 12 tones that make up traditional harmonic music.

It does not matter how many trained musicians, musicologists and critic-journalists continue to misuse the term 12-tone as equivalent to tone row. The result is still misleading and inaccurate.

Music history records that the 12-tone system was in use for centuries before Arnold Schoenberg invented tone rows

ERNEST C. OAKLEY

Pasadena

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Mark Swed replies: The “12-tone system” is shorthand terminology and, like other simplified labels (for instance, “classical” music and “Minimalism”), may not be perfect. But it is accepted by such sources as the Harvard Dictionary of Music and Musicians and the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and is what The Times uses.