Disgusted by Repetition
The only people who understood or admired this kind of music were other musicians.
Ibid.
By the time we get to Schoenberg’s 1911 Sechs kleine Klavierstücke ("Six Little Pieces for the Piano"), the door on any sort of public aesthetic has been slammed shut.
Howard Goodall describes Schoenberg and his impact in this unfriendly fashion:
'The "twelve-tone" formula that Schoenberg began exploring in the early 1900s—the one arguably anticipated by Liszt's Faust of 1855—treated each of the twelve notes in the Western scale as equals in order to do away with the sense of "home" in any given piece of music. Not one of them was allowed to be repeated in a melodic phrase, which prevented the listener's ear from latching on to any note as the centre of gravity. It was as radical a formula for music as it would be for a language if you ruled that no letter of the alphabet could be used more than once in a sentence.'
'Fascinating and brain-teasing though this limitation might be, its main problem as applied to music was that the only people who understood or admired it were other musicians. The public, then as now, were simply baffled. Schoenberg's theoretical rebellion, which later acquired the labels 'serialism' or 'atonality', produced decades of scholarly hot air, books, debates and seminars, and—in its purest, strictest form—not one piece of music, in a hundred years'-worth of effort, that a normal person could understand or enjoy.'
