Watkins+ +Schoenberg+and+Architecture+ +2008

Schoenberg’s Interior Designs
HOLLY WATKINS
A
fter moving to Los Angeles in 1934, Arnold Schoenberg pondered
whether or not to build a new house in his adopted city. His longtime
friend and artistic ally, the architect Adolf Loos, had died in 1933,
but the composer still hoped to incorporate Loos’s distinctive style in a home
of his own. He was especially keen on one of Loos’s most characteristic tech-
niques: adorning interior walls with thin sheets of marble or wood, an eco-
nomical and more modern alternative to old-fashioned ornamental coverings
like wallpaper. The local architect whom Schoenberg consulted (Richard
Neutra, who had emigrated from Vienna in 1923) lacked experience in this
technique, so Schoenberg dispatched a letter to Vienna, addressed to Loos’s
former student Heinrich Kulka. In words at once urgent and matter-of-fact,
the composer bombarded Kulka with detailed questions about Loos’s method
of wall paneling before apologizing for all the trouble.1 Unperturbed, Kulka
responded to Schoenberg’s letter right away, and he even offered to execute a
sketch of the proposed house. In a handwritten postscript, he added a request
Loos had once made: “Once I am dead, tell Arnold Schoenberg that he was
my best friend!”2
Despite numerous references to the friendship between the two men in the
literature on Viennese modernism, Schoenberg’s admiration for Loos’s ap-
proach to interior design has rarely been considered in much detail. Accounts
of fin-de-siècle Vienna typically pair Loos’s polemic against ornament (defini-
tively stated in the 1908 essay “Ornament and Crime”) with Schoenberg’s
This article is an expanded version of a paper I delivered at the Seventieth Annual Meeting of
the American Musicological Society in Seattle, 2004. I would like to thank Joseph Auner, Melina
Esse, Brian Hyer, Peter Schmelz, Richard Taruskin, and William Taylor for their generous com-
ments on subsequent drafts. Translations are my own unless otherwise noted.
1. Schoenberg, letter to Heinrich Kulka, 1936, in Arnold Schoenberg Letters, ed. Erwin Stein,
trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), 197–98. The recipi-
ent is mistakenly listed as “K. Kulka.”
2. Facsimiles of Schoenberg’s letter and Kulka’s reply are reproduced in Nuria Nono-
Schoenberg, ed., Arnold Schönberg 1874–1951: Lebensgeschichte in Begegnungen (Klagenfurt:
Ritter Klagenfurt, 1992), 326.
Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 61, Number 1, pp. 123–206, ISSN 0003-0139, electronic ISSN
1547-3848. © 2008 by the American Musicological Society. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission
to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website,
www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/jams.2008.61.1.123.
124 Journal of the American Musicological Society
simultaneous venture into atonality as parallel examples of the critique of

Viennese aestheticism. Often citing Loos’s and Schoenberg’s shared sympathy
for the journalistic agitations of Karl Kraus, these studies include the composer
in a modernist project that aimed to strip away all decoration from language,
design, and the arts.3 And yet, although it is true that Schoenberg and Loos
paid little heed to the allegedly decadent demand for beauty, their rejection of
bourgeois aesthetics had radically divergent consequences—works such as
Erwartung and the Five Orchestral Pieces (both composed in 1909) can
hardly be said to reflect the “plain, undecorated simplicity” that Loos advo-
cated in “Ornament and Crime.”4 Nor do the stark facades of Loos’s Steiner
house (Vienna, 1910) appear to endorse the urgent expressive agenda of
Schoenberg’s atonal music (Figs. 1 and 2).5
The aesthetic disjunctions between Schoenberg’s and Loos’s works around
1910, while partly a product of differences in their creative media, reflect the
diverse responses to urban modernity in the early twentieth century. Loos’s
condemnation of ornament resonated with worries that the surface-oriented
culture of the metropolis endangered the sacrosanct interiority long cherished
by Austrians and Germans. As Janet Ward has shown, authors from Stefan
Zweig and Georg Lukács to the right-wing nationalists Gertrud Bäumer and
Friedrich Schönemann feared the psychological effects of urbanization and
commoditization, processes generally understood to precipitate a standardiza-
tion of desires and consequential withering of inner life.6 To mitigate such
3. In their study Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), Allan Janik
and Stephen Toulman dub the shared project of Loos, Schoenberg, and Kraus the “critique of
bourgeois aestheticism.” Expanding on his earlier work in Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and
Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), Carl Schorske makes similar claims in a chapter of
Thinking with History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1998) titled “From Public Scene to Private Space: Architecture as Culture
Criticism.” Leon Botstein applies much the same critical apparatus to Schoenberg in his “Music
and the Critique of Culture: Arnold Schoenberg, Heinrich Schenker, and the Emergence of
Modernism in Fin de Siècle Vienna,” in Constructive Dissonance: Arnold Schoenberg and the
Transformations of Twentieth-Century Culture, ed. Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey, 3–22
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997). See also Dagmar Barnouw,
“Wiener Moderne and the Tensions of Modernism,” in Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern: A Com-
panion to the Second Viennese School, ed. Bryan R. Simms, 73–127 (Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press, 1999); and Alan Lessem, “Schönberg and the Crisis of Expressionism,” Music and Letters 4
(1974): 429–36. More recently, Nicholas Cook has written about Loos’s aesthetics in relation to
Heinrich Schenker’s “reluctant modernism.” See chap. 2 of The Schenker Project: Culture, Race,
and Music Theory in “Fin-de-siècle” Vienna (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
4. Adolf Loos, “Ornament and Crime,” in Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays, trans.
Michael Mitchell (Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 1998), 168.
5. The interior of Schoenberg’s apartment at the time, however, exhibited a “tastefully deco-
rated simplicity” of which Loos would no doubt have approved. See Paul Wilhelm’s 1909 inter-
view with Schoenberg, in Joseph Auner, A Schoenberg Reader: Documents of a Life (New Haven,
CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 58.
6. Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), esp. 37–41.
Schoenberg’s Interior Designs 125
Figure 1 Adolf Loos, Steiner House (Vienna, 1910), view from the street. Photograph from
Albertina Museum, Vienna (Loos-Archiv, ALA 2574). Used by permission.
Figure 2 Steiner House, view from the side and rear. Albertina Museum, Vienna (Loos-Archiv,
ALA 2577). Used by permission.
threats, Loos set about severing the links between interiority and its outward
expression so that individuality could flourish in a private, protected space.
Schoenberg, on the other hand, pursued the quite different goal of making
music a more accurate vehicle for the expression of “inner nature.”7 While
Loos concealed subjectivity behind a masklike facade, Schoenberg sought to
externalize interior feeling and place it on display in performance.
This basic distinction between the two men’s early artistic philosophies rec-
ommends a different approach to Schoenberg’s career, one that situates his
music in relation to the pressures of urban modernity rather than sealing it off
according to strictly aesthetic concerns. By considering the challenges the
metropolitan cityscape posed to interiorized subjectivity, we can find in
Schoenberg’s music the shifting manifestations of an “urbanized conscious-
ness.”8 Working through analyses of the atonal works, the unfinished oratorio
Die Jakobsleiter (Jacob’s Ladder), and the twelve-tone method, this essay seeks
to demonstrate that Schoenberg eventually adopted in his music the self-
protective stance Loos had long championed. In other words, it is to twelve-
tone music and Loos’s residential designs that we should look, rather than to
atonality and the rejection of ornament, for a more significant convergence of
musical and architectural aims. It has long been customary, of course, to com-
pare music and architecture on the basis of specific structural attributes, such
as symmetry or repetition. Setting aside commonplace images of “frozen mu-
sic” and “liquid architecture,” this essay takes the relationship between interior
and exterior as the point of departure for a comparison of Schoenberg’s and
Loos’s treatment of space in each of their media. In Loos’s own brand of cul-
tural theory, concepts of interior and exterior open out onto the theme of
modern subjectivity, bringing a third “medium” into play. To speak of musical
interiors and exteriors is to speak metaphorically, but critical attention to such
metaphors also makes possible a more nuanced understanding of Schoen-
bergian musical space. In sympathy with recent scholarly efforts to restore the
repressed “real world” meanings of abstract spatial formulations, this essay
represents a step in the direction of a cultural geography of musical space.9
Accordingly, I will be concerned to show how the multiple modalities of musi-
cal space in Schoenberg’s works are related to the constitution of subjective in-
teriority and to the lived environments of urban and residential space. This
approach has far-reaching implications for the interpretation of Schoenberg’s
music.
7. “In its most advanced state, art is exclusively concerned with the representation of inner
nature.” Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, trans. Roy E. Carter (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1978), 18. This text is a translation of the 1922 edition of the Har-
monielehre; all quoted passages appear also in the original 1911 version unless otherwise noted.
8. The quoted phrase is David Harvey’s, from Consciousness and the Urban Experience:
Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbanization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1985), 266.
9. For a good overview of these efforts, see the collection Thinking Space, ed. Mike Crang
and Nigel Thrift (London and New York: Routledge, 2000).
Proceeding chronologically, the essay is divided into three parts, with two
outer sections addressing configurations of musical space in atonal and twelve-
tone music respectively and a middle section on urban space and Die Jakobs-
leiter. First, drawing on essays by Schoenberg, Loos, and Georg Simmel, I
argue that the atonal works circa 1910 offer a sonic analogue to the collapse of
interiority under the pressures of urban existence, a collapse articulated in part
through the destruction of the figure-ground relationships integral to tonal
music. The resulting confusion between interior and exterior, in both a musi-
cal and a psychological sense, sharply differentiates Schoenberg’s atonal works
from the spatial practices Loos espoused. The second section proposes that
Die Jakobsleiter (1917) confronted not only the formal limitations of the
“intuitive” methodology employed in the atonal works but also the problem
of how interiority and individual integrity could be restored in a modern
urban setting.10 Richard Taruskin has explored the religious implications of
the new musical space foreshadowed in the oratorio, namely, the affinities
between that space and the vision of heaven Schoenberg admired in Balzac’s
novel Seraphita. But, as Taruskin comments, even the desire to detach the arts
from the earthly realm arises “in response to worldly pressures.”11 Drawing on
one of Die Jakobsleiter’s more neglected sources, August Strindberg’s tale
Jacob Wrestles (Jacob lutte), I argue that the oratorio also engages with issues of
urban subjectivity and the kinetic demands of the city.
To illustrate the persistence of these themes in twelve-tone composition,
the final section turns to Schoenberg’s descriptions of his dodecaphonic
method for evidence that Loos’s residential designs of the 1920s and 1930s—
designs stressing freedom of movement and a flexible treatment of interior
space—shaped the composer’s mature conception of musical space more di-
rectly than has been recognized to date. I contend that Loos’s work, which
offered Schoenberg a more visceral experience of spatial complexity than
Seraphita, was a crucial factor in the composer’s desire to define the theoreti-
cal basis of twelve-tone music in terms of “two-or-more-dimensional space.”
In a way, this formula represented a largely rhetorical improvement on his
long-standing view of music as possessing only two dimensions (“horizontal”
melody and “vertical” harmony)—that is, the exact nature of the implied ad-
ditional dimensions remains rather vague. But it is just this lack of correspon-
dence between musical space and “real” space that encourages us to consider
other reasons why the idea of multidimensionality so appealed to Schoenberg.
Loos’s handling of space and his disassociation of interior and exterior served
explicit social and psychological purposes related to the cultivation of reserve.
By showing how twelve-tone music exhibits a Loosian commitment to privacy
10. Joseph Auner defines the “intuitive aesthetic” of the atonal years in his dissertation,
“Schoenberg’s Compositional and Aesthetic Transformations, 1910–1913: The Genesis of Die
glückliche Hand” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1991).
11. Richard Taruskin, “Scriabin and the Superhuman,” in Defining Russia Musically (Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 356.
and interiority, I offer a new perspective on that music as an aesthetic expres-

sion of urban (counter-)culture.
Urban Dynamics of Exposure and Reserve
Loos and Schoenberg met around the year 1905 at the home of Gustav and
Alma Mahler.12 Four years Schoenberg’s senior, Loos had made a name for
himself as a journalist who, like his close associate Karl Kraus, subjected the
dominant mores of the Viennese public to biting critique. Unlike Kraus, how-
ever, Loos played an active role in the careers of several marginal artists, mate-
rially supporting Schoenberg and others such as Oskar Kokoschka and Peter
Altenberg. Loos, whom Neutra colorfully described as “a violent but quiet-
spoken attacker, a reformer of ruthlessness and at the same time a most calm,
almost whispering, mildly smiling philosopher of wrath,” was a welcome pres-
ence at rehearsals and concerts of music by Schoenberg and his students in
Berlin and Vienna (especially those mounted by the Society for Private
Musical Performances).13 In 1919, Schoenberg returned the favor by con-
tributing an article on music education, the reform of concert life, and copy-
right issues to Loos’s “Guidelines for a Ministry of Arts.” Commentators from
Rudolf Kolisch to Carl Dahlhaus have suggested that the affinity between the
two men lay in their unified stance against bourgeois expectations and their re-
jection of ornament, which Dahlhaus associates with the emancipation of dis-
sonance.14 These claims become harder to sustain once we look more closely
at the stylistic consequences of Loos’s attack on ornament.
The views Loos advanced in “Ornament and Crime” are contiguous with a
network of ideas he developed regarding the taste and behavior of the modern
urbanite.15 Although new economic realities had made true aristocratic extrav-
agance a rarity, Loos complained that German and Austrian designers contin-
12. Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, Schoenberg: His Life, World and Work, trans. Humphrey
Searle (London: Calder, 1977), 93.
13. Richard Neutra, review of Adolf Loos: Pioneer of Modern Architecture, Architectural
Forum 125 (1966): 88–89, 116. On Loos’s concert and rehearsal attendance, see Stucken-
schmidt, Schoenberg, 149–50, 157–58.
14. See Carl Dahlhaus, “Emancipation of the Dissonance,” in Schoenberg and the New Music:
Essays, trans. Derrick Puffett and Alfred Clayton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987),
120–27; and Kolisch’s comments on Schoenberg and Loos, reproduced in Joan Allen Smith,
Schoenberg and His Circle: A Viennese Portrait (New York: Schirmer Books, 1986), 35–36. See
also Janik and Toulman, Wittgenstein’s Vienna, 110–12; and Botstein, “Music and the Critique of
Culture,” 13.
15. Many of these ideas can be found in Adolf Loos, Spoken into the Void: Collected Essays,
1897–1900, trans. Jane O. Newman and John H. Smith, introduction by Aldo Rossi (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1982).
ued to simulate luxury by ornamenting cheap materials.16 Attacking the im-

posing edifices of Vienna’s Ringstrasse, built in a hodgepodge of classical,
gothic, and Renaissance styles, Loos found confirmation of the moral bank-
ruptcy and aesthetic backwardness of Austria as a whole in the imitation of
carved stone or marble facades with poured cement. In this modern-day
“Potemkin city,” builders profited while renters and buyers were duped by the
appearance of aristocratic glory, heedless of its bargain-priced fabrication.17
The truly cultivated man, on the other hand, realized that facades—whether
of one’s residence, clothing, or objects of daily use—were no longer suitable
means of personal expression. In “Ornament and Crime,” Loos proposed a
different function for cladding: “Modern man uses his dress as a disguise. His
sense of his own individuality is so immensely strong it can no longer be ex-
pressed in dress.”18 The urbanite’s exterior “look,” rather than conveying
something essential about his or her personality, should instead bar access to
that (now wholly) private domain through a deliberate plainness. Loos’s posi-
tion implies that a person’s outer and inner lives are incommensurable: the
latter can simply no longer be expressed in the terms of the former.19
Though its unusual approach to the ethics of decoration has garnered the
most scholarly attention, “Ornament and Crime” also deserves a place among
contemporary studies addressing the sensory conditions of the modern city.20
Inasmuch as he recommended a kind of retreat from display that was antithet-
ical to the city’s prevailing abundance of advertising and other visual attrac-
tions, Loos appears to have been aware of the demands on what I will call the
urban subject, demands identified so acutely by Georg Simmel. A resident of
Berlin rather than Vienna, Simmel diagnosed the general effects of city living
in the well-known essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903). Singling
out the “intensification of nervous stimulation” as the defining psychological
feature of metropolitan modernity, Simmel described the urban environment
as a jumble of sensuous surfaces animated by “the rapid crowding-together of
16. Mitchell Schwarzer offers a detailed discussion of the economic dimension of Loos’s
views in German Architectural Theory and the Search for Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995). On Loos’s concept of material, see Roberto Schezen, Adolf Loos:
Architecture 1903–1932 (New York: Monacelli, 1996).
17. See Loos’s essay “Potemkin City” (1898), reproduced in Spoken into the Void. Janet
Stewart explores Loos’s latter-day concept of aristocracy and its relevance to modernity in
Fashioning Vienna: Adolf Loos’s Cultural Criticism (London and New York: Routledge, 2000).
18. Loos, “Ornament and Crime,” 175.
19. The concept of incommensurability has proved useful in studies of Loos’s architecture
as well as his social theories. See especially Massimo Cacciari, Architecture and Nihilism: On the
Philosophy of Modern Architecture, trans. Stephen Sartarelli, introduction by Patrizia Lombardo
(New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1993).
20. For a useful survey of urban theory in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
see Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), esp. chap. 2, “Agoraphobia: Psychopathologies of Urban Space.”
changing images, the sharp discontinuity between things encompassed in a

single glance, and the unexpected quality of onrushing impressions.”21
Simmel claimed that urban dwellers were forced to operate at a heightened
level of consciousness in order to keep up with constant sensory bombard-
ment and an accelerated pace of movement. Loos, too, was sensitive to the
new psychic realities of fin-de-siècle life. In an 1898 essay on footwear, he ob-
served, “It would be impossible for us to walk as slowly as people did in earlier
times. We are too nervous for that.”22
In Simmel’s view, the end result of this exaggerated consciousness was a
tendency toward self-preservation, exemplified by the urban subject’s aloof
stance toward others. To prevent becoming “inwardly atomized” by the fre-
quency of interpersonal encounters, city dwellers adopted an attitude of re-
serve that appeared cold to outsiders.23 While Simmel noted that this reserve
often bordered on aversion or antipathy, Loos took a more positive view: in-
stead of actually avoiding his fellow man, the urbanite should simply refuse to
reveal anything to him. Loos’s ideal man thus shielded himself from sensory
overload and worked to reduce it by donning a plain dark suit and renting
a plain-looking residence. Secure in his own uniqueness, the “modern man”
retreated behind a cloak of anonymity, repudiating not only false airs but any
public display of individuality. Private appearances, however, were another
matter. Loos and his first wife Lina, for example, decorated their bedroom
quite idiosyncratically, with rich white fabric lining the walls and thick swaths
of white angora fleece covering the floor and bed frame.24
Loos’s transfer of self-expression to the private sphere resembles Simmel’s
hypothesis that the persona of the modern urbanite is a curious hybrid of
“highly personal subjectivity” and “utmost impersonality.”25 City dwellers en-
joyed a high degree of subjective liberty, at least in comparison to inhabitants
of the countryside or small towns. Despite the apparently beneficial nature of
this freedom, Simmel had little to say regarding the salutary effects city living
might have on the cultivation of interiority—he was more concerned with the
way that the seemingly external matters of time management and commercial
calculation threatened to contaminate the subject’s inner life. To further com-
plicate matters, the intellectual character of city life was not necessarily con-
ducive to interior reflection. The intellect assumed the burden of shielding
21. Georg Simmel, “Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben,” in vol. 7 of Gesamtausgabe, ed.
Otthein Rammstedt, (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988), 117. In translating passages of this essay, I
have consulted H. H. Gerth’s English version, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Classic
Essays on the Culture of Cities, ed. Richard Sennett, 47–60 (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts,
1969).
22. Loos, Spoken into the Void, 55.
23. Simmel, “Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben,” 122.
24. See August Sarnitz, Adolf Loos, 1870–1933: Architect, Cultural Critic, Dandy (Cologne:
Taschen, 2003), 27.
the subject from the city’s relentless sensuous stimulation, protecting the “un-
conscious layers of the soul [Seele]” and the “depth of the personality” from
the uprooting effects of the urban environment.26 In fulfilling this role, how-
ever, urban culture tended to bypass spirituality and other “deep” emotional
realms due to its economically motivated rationality. As a result, the urbanite’s
dealings with others might become so impersonal and his position in the me-
tropolis so coglike that he would find it impossible to maintain a firm ground-
ing in religious feeling or moral values—in other words, to maintain depth of
character.
For Loos, this was where the architect should intervene. Applying the same
logic to architectural design as he did to clothing, Loos declared in 1914 that
a house, like a person, must be “discreet on the outside; its entire richness
should be disclosed on the inside.”27 In contrast to prevailing decorative
trends, he stripped his facades of nearly all ornament and other deliberately ap-
pealing features. To the horror of his contemporaries, Loos’s windows were
often bereft of elaborate sills or trim. Objecting to the sparse impression made
by the windows of the so-called Looshaus, a commercial building designed for
Vienna’s Michaelerplatz, public officials forced the builders to install flower
boxes.28 The facades of the architect’s villas, usually composed of light-colored
stucco, mutely testified to the houses’ refusal to speak on behalf of their occu-
pants. While the Steiner house presented a reasonably welcoming appearance
to the street, thanks to its broad entryway and curved front roof, the rear and
side walls are studded with largely featureless windows, staring blankly out-
ward like a panoply of lidless eyes. This relationship was reversed as the public
face of later designs became ever more severe. The Moller house (Vienna,
1928), for instance, allows larger fenestration in the rear, which opens onto a
private garden (Fig. 3). By contrast, the street side is uncompromisingly spare
and nearly windowless (Fig. 4).
Ensconced within their modern citadels, the occupants of Loos’s villas took
refuge in the music room or cozy built-in nooks suitable for intimate conver-
sation or solitary reading. As architectural historian Benedetto Gravagnuolo
put it, the “silence of the facade” belied the “habitability of the internal
space.”29 Design features such as small windows and inward-facing furniture
26. Ibid., 117.

27. “Das haus sei nach außen verschwiegen, im inner offenbare es seinen ganzen reichtum.”
(Loos considered the capitalization of nouns in German to be outmoded.) See his essay
“Heimatkunst” (1914), in Trotzdem, 1900–1930, ed. Adolf Opel (Vienna: Prachner, 1982
[1931]), 129.
28. Incidentally, when the destitute artist Adolf Hitler sketched this plaza while living in
Vienna, he copied from an eighteenth-century image rather than reproduce Loos’s modernist
travesty. See Brigitte Hamann, Hitler’s Vienna: A Dictator’s Apprenticeship, trans. Thomas
Thornton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 72.
29. Benedetto Gravagnuolo, Adolf Loos: Theory and Works, trans. C. H. Evans (New York:
Rizzoli, 1982), 22.
Figure 3 Adolf Loos, Moller house (Vienna, 1928), view from the rear. Albertina Museum,
Vienna (Loos-Archiv, ALA 2447). Used by permission.
ensured his clients privacy. In fact, traditional Germanic Innerlichkeit appears

to be what counterbalances the rejection of ornament.30 “After all the toil
and tribulations of the day,” Loos remarked, “we can go to hear Beethoven or
Tristan. My shoemaker cannot.” The shoemaker, a relic of the artisanal past
marooned in the industrial present, may happily continue to stamp decora-
tions on his shoes—his elaborate work stands in for the refined pleasures he
cannot afford. But for those in a position to consume high art, the pursuit of
30. Drawing on the writings of Loos and others, Sherwin Simmons shows how critical dis-
tinctions between “fine” and “applied” art circa 1910 were often based on the aggressive separa-
tion of the purportedly male sphere of interiority from the feminized realm of ornament. See his
“Ornament, Gender, and Interiority in Viennese Expressionism,” Modernism/Modernity 8
(2001): 245–76. On perceptions of women and specifically female modes of participation in
German urban life, see Katharina von Ankum, ed., Women in the Metropolis: Gender and
Modernity in Weimar Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997).
Although Loos’s critique of ornament can be seen as an attack on femininity, his views on gender
contained both patriarchal and democratic elements. As a spokesman for normative heterosexual-
ity (though one with tongue firmly in cheek), he identified a woman’s most pressing aim as hold-
ing on to her “big, strong man.” But he also looked forward to a “new and greater time” when
women did not have to decorate themselves in the appeal to men’s limitless sexual desires, which
he deemed “unnatural.” Instead, she would attain “equal status” with man through economic
independence, or the ability to work. Ultimately, Loos believed that the styles of men’s and
women’s fashions would converge, in accordance with his view that the advancement of civiliza-
tion entailed the abandonment of ornament. See the essay “Ladies Fashion,” in Spoken into the
Void, 99–103.
Figure 4 Moller house, view from the front. Albertina Museum, Vienna (Loos-Archiv, ALA
2445). Used by permission.
inner experience must substitute for the shallow pleasures of decoration:

“Anyone who goes to the Ninth and then sits down to design a wallpaper pat-
tern is either a fraud or a degenerate.”31
31. Loos, “Ornament and Crime,” 175. Wallpaper, of course, was an aspect of interior de-
sign, but here too Loos favored plain wall coverings that set into relief the uniqueness of the occu-
pant’s possessions.
Without a doubt, Schoenberg and Loos shared a similar disdain for bour-
geois standards of beauty, but the contrast between Loos’s “silent” facades
and Schoenberg’s intensely expressive atonal works could not be greater. This
disparity would not have disturbed Loos, who believed that objects for use
and objets d’art were subject to separate sets of laws. Architecture was not a
fine art in Loos’s view, and the crime of the applied arts was that they indis-
criminately blended art and practicality, obscuring form and function in the
process.32 Nevertheless, the divergent aesthetic appearances of Loos’s and
Schoenberg’s creations are instructive for the way they point to two different
facets of modern urban experience. External reserve may have been a com-
mon strategy for dealing with city life, but it did not eclipse the contempora-
neous compulsion to expose the deepest fears and desires of the subject for
therapeutic or truth-seeking purposes.33 One might even suspect that the re-
serve demanded of the urbanite necessitated some compensatory means of
expression, as embodied in the violent gestures of Expressionist art or the
stream of talk encouraged by Freudian psychoanalysis. In an aphorism of
1909, Schoenberg made it clear that artists were obliged to disclose the entire
range of emotional responses to present-day life: “Art is the cry of distress ut-
tered by those who experience firsthand the fate of mankind. . . . Who do not
turn their eyes away, to shield themselves from emotions, but open them wide,
in order to tackle what must be tackled.”34 Far from retreating to a protected
inner sphere, Schoenberg composed in a “virtual frenzy of confession,” as one
contemporary put it.35
While Loos was convinced that truthful living depended on a clean separa-
tion between inner and outer selves, Schoenberg struggled to find a musical
language capable of expressing individual feelings more accurately. Convinced
that artistic truth must be dredged up from the self ’s uncharted depths,
32. See, for example, Loos’s essay “The Christmas Exhibition at the Austrian Museum” in
Spoken into the Void: “The modern spirit requires above all else that the utilitarian object be practi-
cal. It holds beauty to mean the highest perfection. And since the impractical never is perfect, it
can also never be beautiful” (94).
33. On the ties between Expressionist art and Freud’s diagnoses, see Claude Cernuschi,
“Oskar Kokoschka and Sigmund Freud: Parallel Logics in the Exegetical and Rhetorical Strategies
of Expressionism and Psychoanalysis,” Word and Image 15 (1999): 351–80. As many authors
have noted, Expressionism was less a coherent movement than a concatenation of local artists’
groups—notably Die Brücke in Dresden and Der blaue Reiter in Munich—that were occupied
with similar expressive, technical, and representational concerns. See Paul Vogt, Expressionism: A
German Intuition 1905–1920, trans. Antony Vivis and Robert Erich Wolf (New York: The
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1980); Donald E. Gordon, Expressionism and Idea (New
Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1987); Franz Roh, German Painting in the
20th Century, trans. Catherine Hutter (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1973); and
Herbert Read, A Concise History of Modern Painting (London and New York: Thames and
Hudson, 1974).
34. Schoenberg, aphorism from 1909, in Auner, A Schoenberg Reader, 64.
35. Ernst Decsey in the journal Die Musik (1912), quoted in Lessem, “Schönberg and the
Crisis of Expressionism,” 433.
Schoenberg’s turn to atonality was motivated by a desire to compose solely

according to his “inner compulsion.”36 “Art,” he wrote to Kandinsky in
1911, “belongs to the unconscious! One must express oneself ! Express oneself
directly! Not one’s taste, or one’s upbringing, or one’s intelligence, knowl-
edge or skill. Not all these acquired characteristics, but that which is inborn,
instinctive.”37 As Joseph Auner points out, Schoenberg’s thinking at this time
was probably not directly influenced by Freud’s published works, despite the
composer’s emphasis on instinct and the unconscious.38 Rather, such widely
employed terminology was an extension of Romanticism, which placed
greater trust in subjective interiority and depth than in the “external” doc-
trines of religion and philosophy—or, in Schoenberg’s case, of musical con-
vention. These convictions reverberate through both Schoenberg’s and
Kandinsky’s writings as well as those of the composer’s students. In a 1912
collection of essays dedicated to Schoenberg, Paul Königer wrote, “Every-
thing that he gives comes from his depths, affects the innermost essence, and
allows it to grow, like a tree grows out of inner necessity.”39 In Schoenberg’s
artistic circle, an essentially Romantic set of concepts that included innerness,
the unconscious, necessity, and organicism still governed attitudes toward
artistic creation.
In an essay on Liszt dating from 1911, Schoenberg remarked more than
once that true creativity consists in bringing to the surface that which lies deep
within the artist’s unconscious.40 But Schoenberg went beyond merely coax-
ing the hidden contents of psychic experience into the settled realm of artistic
appearance. Instead, he forced the realm of appearance to accommodate the
unpredictable fluctuations of his creative impulses by subordinating his con-
scious knowledge of compositional “rules” to the occult decision making of
the unconscious. Hoping to access a pristine inner source beyond the reach of
tradition and habit, Schoenberg developed a working method akin to auto-
matic writing. He famously completed the music for Erwartung in only sev-
enteen days, and next to no sketch material exists for this or any other work
composed in the years 1909–12.41 In a letter to Ferruccio Busoni, the com-
poser wrote that in the Piano Pieces, Op. 11, he was seeking an “unshackled
36. Schoenberg, program note to a 1910 concert of his music, in Auner, A Schoenberg
Reader, 78.
37. Schoenberg, letter to Kandinsky, 1911, in ibid., 89.
38. Ibid.
39. Paul Königer, short article from Alban Berg et al., Arnold Schönberg (Munich: Piper,
1912), trans. Barbara Z. Schoenberg, in Schoenberg and His World, ed. Walter Frisch (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 258.
40. Arnold Schoenberg, “Franz Liszt’s Work and Being” (1911), in Style and Idea, ed.
Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984),
442–47.
41. See Ethan Haimo, “Atonality, Analysis, and the Intentional Fallacy,” Music Theory
Spectrum 18 (1996): 167–99.
flexibility of form uninhibited by ‘logic’ ”—a goal he admitted he had not yet
met.42 Most later commentators have been willing to concede that Schoen-
berg realized his “intuitive aesthetic” only in select athematic pieces, such
as the last of the Five Orchestral Pieces, Op. 16, the third movement of
Opus 11, and Erwartung.43 But even though movements like the much-
analyzed Opus 11, no. 1, exhibit recurring sonorities and a recognizable for-
mal plan, it nonetheless appears that Schoenberg composed such pieces by a
process of association in which motivic relationships were deployed in an im-
pulsive, unplanned way.44 The ultimate aim of his approach, even if it was not
always achieved in the manner one might expect, was to overcome the separa-
tion between the “external” demands of one’s training (for example, conven-
tions governing form, harmony, and thematic development) and “internal,”
unconscious motivations.
Collapsing the distinction between the realm of appearance and interior
feeling was a common Expressionist device for portraying states of psychic dis-
tress. The classic early example is Edvard Munch’s 1893 painting The Scream,
whose scenic distortions appear to emanate from the internal torment of the
screaming figure.45 Later artists such as Ludwig Meidner and Lyonel Fein-
inger used similar techniques to portray the alternately invigorating and over-
powering character of urban life. In Meidner’s Street at Night in Berlin
42. Letter from Schoenberg to Ferruccio Busoni, 1909, in Auner, A Schoenberg Reader, 70.
43. See, for example, chap. 3 of Joseph Auner, “Schoenberg’s Compositional and Aesthetic
Transformations, 1910–1913”; and Bryan R. Simms, The Atonal Music of Arnold Schoenberg,
1908–1923 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
44. In the Theory of Harmony, Schoenberg wrote that the aim of advanced art is “just the im-
itation of impressions, which have now combined, through association with one another and with
other sense impressions, to form new complexes and new motives, new stimuli” (18). Analytical
studies of Opus 11, no. 1, are legion, and include: (1) analyses in terms of pitch-class sets: see esp.
Gary Wittlich, “Interval Set Structure in Schoenberg’s Op. 11, No. 1,” Perspectives of New Music
13 (1974): 41–55; and Allen Forte, “The Magical Kaleidoscope: Schoenberg’s First Atonal
Masterwork, Opus 11, Number 1,” Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 5 (1981): 127–68;
(2) the continuing presence of tonal harmony: Will Ogdon, “How Tonality Functions in Schoen-
berg’s Opus 11, Number 1,” Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 5 (1981): 169–81; (3) ref-
erences to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde: Thomas Christensen, “Schoenberg’s Opus 11, No. 1: A
Parody of Pitch Cells from Tristan,” Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 10 (1987): 38–44;
and (4) dramatic character: Candace Brower, “Dramatic Structure in Schoenberg’s Opus 11,
Number 1,” Music Research Forum 4 (1989): 25–52. On the likelihood that Schoenberg com-
posed without a well-defined notion of pitch-class sets, see Haimo, “Atonality, Analysis, and the
Intentional Fallacy.”
45. Fredric Jameson describes Munch’s painting as follows: “The absent scream returns, as it
were, in a dialectic of loops and spirals, circling ever more closely toward that even more absent
experience of atrocious solitude and anxiety which the scream was itself to ‘express.’ Such loops
inscribe themselves on the painted surface in the form of those great concentric circles in which
sonorous vibration becomes ultimately visible, as on the surface of a sheet of water, in an infinite
regress which fans out from the sufferer to become the very geography of a universe in which pain
itself now speaks and vibrates through the material sunset and landscape.” See his Postmodernism,
or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 14.
(1913), for instance, the impossible angles of the buildings and the incendiary
flashes of electric light convey the almost hallucinatory impact of the city on
the all-but-dwarfed human figures.46 Schoenberg’s own series of “Gaze”
paintings, in which faces and eyes appear in various degrees of disembodi-
ment, depict their subjects at the interface between inside and out, neither
wholly lost in interior reflection nor fully in contact with the outside world,
which is invariably absent in these works.
In Erwartung, the permeability between inner and outer realms is a central
dramatic and musical conceit. Early in the first scene, the Woman vacillates be-
tween vague feelings of fear, commentaries on the bright moon and chirping
crickets, and a doubtful impression of her lover’s presence:
Ich fürchte mich. . . . Was für schwere Luft herausschlägt . . . wie ein Sturm,
der steht. . . . So grauenvoll ruhig und leer. . . . Aber hier ist es wenigstens hell.
. . . Der Mond war früher so hell. . . . Oh! Noch immer die Grille mit ihrem
Liebeslied. . . . Nicht sprechen . . . es ist so süß bei dir. . . . Der Mond ist in der
Dämmerung. . . .
(I’m afraid. . . . How heavy the air is that comes out of there . . . like a storm, it
is. . . . So dreadfully silent and empty. . . . But here at least it’s bright. . . . The
moon was so bright earlier. . . . Oh, still the cricket with its love-song. . . .
Don’t speak . . . it’s so sweet beside you. . . . The moon is going down. . . .)47
Bryan Simms describes Erwartung’s music as mimicking the “rapidly chang-

ing emotional states of the Woman,” but this is only part of the story.48 More
than just an interior soundtrack, the orchestra points to the nocturnal sur-
roundings in a way that highlights the Woman’s indiscriminate receptivity to
outer as well as inner impressions. The remarkable chamberlike scoring of the
opening scene creates a sonic landscape in which each instrumental gesture,
though fleeting, stands out as a discrete sensory event. The precise timbral
quality of each gesture is defined not just by choice of instrument but also by
the use of harmonics, mutes, flutter tonguing, and frequent shifts between
solo, tutti, and divisi part writing (Ex. 1). The care that Schoenberg lavished
on the kaleidoscopic circulation of different tone colors and rhythms suggests
that the music alludes to the Woman’s exceedingly acute experience of exter-
nal events as well as to the flux of her interior emotions. Indeed, some of the
musical gestures can be easily traced to environmental stimuli. The moonlight,
46. Ward writes that “in 1898, the electric ad for the Manoli tobacco firm—a revolving wheel
of light high up on the rooftops of Berlin—promptly became a Wilhelmine synonym for ‘insanity’
and the epitome of modernity’s maddening changes in human apperception” (Weimar Surfaces,
101). On the dual significance of the city for Expressionist artists, see Gordon, Expressionism,
134–40.
47. Translation (slightly altered) by Lionel Salter, included in the 1993 Philips recording of
Erwartung, featuring Jessye Norman, James Levine, and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra
(Philips 426 261-2).
48. Simms, Atonal Music, 95–96.
for instance, is figured by bright, gently oscillating celesta triplets and harp
sixteenths—their rhythmic contrast might even be taken as a representation of
flickering light (Ex. 2, mm. 16–17). The rhythms become more punctuated as
the Woman notices the crickets, whose romantic serenade is heard in the
strings (m. 19).
Such timbral and gestural clues are generally more important than the de-
tails of pitch organization in distinguishing between internally and externally
motivated sensations, when such a distinction is possible at all. Most often, the
orchestra evokes a single continuum of transitory impressions. For example,
harmonies built of fourths and tritones support the Woman’s commentary on
the forest setting as well as imaginings of her own invention. In measures 12–
14, multiple renderings of what Taruskin calls the “atonal triad” (a perfect
fourth plus a tritone) accompany the lines “How heavy the air is that comes
out of there . . . like a storm, it is. . . . So dreadfully silent and empty . . .”
(Ex. 3).49 The same harmony and its inversion can be found in measures
20–22, as the Woman remarks to an unknown interlocutor (the crickets?),
“Don’t speak . . . it’s so sweet beside you. . . . The moon is going down,” a
mixture of fantastical and (perhaps) observational realities (Ex. 4). In the
Woman’s psychological universe, there is no firm boundary separating inside
and out: even her perceptions of the forest air and the moon are colored by a
looming sense of dread, conveyed by the persistent yet unsettled sound of
fourth- and tritone-based harmonies.
Erwartung’s sylvan setting notwithstanding, the Woman’s extreme sensi-
tivity to her environment recalls the ill-adapted urban subject Simmel por-
trayed in “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” Once the (external) sensory din
of the urban landscape is allowed to penetrate the (internal) “depth of the
personality” and “unconscious layers of the soul,” the subject responds injudi-
ciously to each and every sensory and interpersonal encounter. The endpoint
of this capitulation can only be an “unimaginable psychic state”—in other
words, madness.50 Simmel’s account takes for granted that the external envi-
ronment profoundly shapes an individual’s affective experience, and his con-
clusions suggest that the realm of inner feeling Schoenberg hoped to capture
in music was not hermetically sealed from the outside world. The final lines of
Schoenberg’s “cry of distress” quoted above acknowledge as much: even
though artists confront the “dark forces” of the world head on, Schoenberg
remarked that they “often close their eyes . . . to envision within themselves
the process that only seems to be in the world outside. And within, inside
them, is the movement of the world, what bursts out is merely the echo: the
work of art.”51
49. See Richard Taruskin, The Early Twentieth Century, vol. 4 of The Oxford History of
Western Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 331–34.
50. Simmel, “Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben,” 122–23.
51. Schoenberg, aphorism from 1909, in Auner, A Schoenberg Reader, 64.
Example 1 Schoenberg, Erwartung, mm. 1–9. © Copyright 1916 by Universal Edition A.G.,
Vienna/UE 5362. Used by permission.
mäßige ä (48) −Ł
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Example 2 Schoenberg, Erwartung, mm. 15–19. © Copyright 1916 by Universal Edition

A.G., Vienna/UE 5362. Used by permission.
viel langsamer (ä = 50)

$
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\\
$
Š 00 ¹ −ŁŁ ¼ ½
Hrf.
Ł
[\
0 ² Ł ¹ ½
%Š 0 ¼ ² ŁŁ
77777
Cel.
\ [\
Š 00 ¹ý Ł ² Ł ¦ Ł ¦ Ł ¦ Ł ¦ Ł Ł ² Ł ¹ ¾ Ł Ł
3 (sieht hinauf)
Frau

A-ber hier ists wen-ig-stens hell. . der Mond
$ viel langsamer
ÿ
1.Solo Geige o. Dpf.
1.Solo-Gge.
o.Dpf.
Š 00
II. Gge.
Š 00 ÿ
m.Dpf.
1.2. Solo-Br.
1.2.Solo Br.m.Dpf.
š 00 ¼ ²¦ ðð ýý
Š
m.Dpf.
\\
1.2. Solo-Vcll. Ý0 ÿ
m. Dpf. 0
Ktrbss. Ý0 ÿ
m.Dpf. % 0
Example 2 continued
$16 ý ¹ ½
1.2.3.gr.Fl. Š ŁŁŁ ýý
Łý
¹ ½
⎤
D-Klar.
%Š
$ ÿ
1.Hr.(F)
m.Dpf.
Š
Łý ¹ ½
%Š
1.Trp.(B)
m.Dpf.
$ sehr Łp Łp ² Łp
¦ Łv Łv ¦ Łv ¦ Ł Ý
H⎡
Š ½ ¾
deutlich
Hrf.
\ v
¦ ² ŁŁ ¦ ² ŁŁ ² ŁŁ ² ŁŁ ² ŁŁ
3
² ŁŁŁ ² ŁŁ ² ŁŁŁ
¹ ¦ ¦ ŁŁ ² ¦ ŁŁ ¦ ŁŁ ¦ ŁŁ ¦ ŁŁ ¦ Ł ¦ ŁŁ ¦ Ł
sehr deutlich
Cel.
%Š ¼ l l l l l l l l
3
Š Ł ² Ł Ł ² Ł ¦ Ł ¦ Łý
3 (kauert nieder, lauscht, sieht vor sich hin)
¼
²Ł
Frau
war frü - her so hell. .

8va
Ł ²Ł ð
$ ¦Ł Ł
⎤
H⎡
1.Solo-Gge.
Š
o.Dpf.
\\\ sehr ruhig und zart
II. Gge.
Š ÿ
m.Dpf.
ŁŁ ýý
1.2. Solo-Br.
Š ¹ ½
m.Dpf.
1.2. Solo-Vcll. Ý ÿ
m. Dpf.
Ktrbss. Ý ÿ
m.Dpf. %
Example 2 continued
$17 noch langsamer (ä = 48)

1.2.3.gr.Fl. Š ÿ
¦ Łý Ł −Ł
½
H⎡
¦Ł ¦Ł
D-Klar.
%Š \ sehr zart
$ m.Dpf. n
1.Hr.(F)
Š ¼ Ł Ł ¹ ¼
m.Dpf.
\\
ÿ
%Š
1.Trp.(B)
Łp ¦ Łp
m.Dpf.
Łp p
Hrf.
$Ý ¦ Łp Łp Łp ¦ Łp Ł ½ ⎤

¦¦ ² ŁŁŁ ¦ ² ŁŁŁ ² ŁŁŁ ² ŁŁŁ ² ŁŁŁ ² ŁŁŁ ² ŁŁŁ l.H.
¦ Ł ¦ Ł ¦ Ł ¦ Ł ¦ Ł ¦ Ł ¦ Ł ŁŁ ¦−ŁŁ ² ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ
Cel.
% Š l l l l l l l ¦−ŁŁ ²¦\\
r.H.
\\
¦Ł ²Ł
Frau Š ½ ¹
(8va) Oh noch
ð
$ noch langsamer
½
1.Solo-Gge.
o.Dpf. Š
am Steg
3 3
m.Dpf.geteilt I.Hälfte trem.
Š ½ ¹ ²Ł ¾ ²Ł ¾ ¦Ł ¾
¦Ł ¾ ¦Ł ¾
II. Gge.
m.Dpf.
II.Hälfte pizz.
\\
1.2. Solo-Br.
Š ÿ š
m.Dpf.
Ý
1.Solo Vcll.m.Dpf.
š Łn Ł ¹ Ý
1.2. Solo-Vcll.
¼ ¼
m. Dpf.
\\
Ktrbss. Ý ÿ
m.Dpf. %
Example 2 continued
$18 ÿ
3.gr.Fl. Š
−Ł ¦ Ł Ł ¦Ł ¦Ł ¦Ł ¦Ł ⎤
Š −Ł
!
D-Klar.
2.Klar.(A) Š ÿ
ÿ
Bss.-Klar.(B)
%Š
$
Cel.
% Š ¦−ŁŁ ²¦ ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ
Łý ¦Ł ý Ł
Š ² Ł Ł ² Ł ¦ Ł ¾ ² Ł ² Ł ¦ Ł
3 3
Frau
im - mer die Gril - le. . mit ih - rem Lie - bes-
$ ÿ
1.Solo-Gge.
o.Dpf.
Š
am Steg
3 3 3 3
Š ¹ ²Ł ¾ ² Ł ¾ ²Ł ¹ ²Ł ¾ ²Ł ¾ ¹ ¦ Ł ¾ ¦ Ł ¾
trem.
II. Gge.
m.Dpf.
pizz. ¦Ł ¾ ¦Ł ¾ ¾
ÿ
Sfach get. m.Dpf.
Br.
m.Dpf.
š
Ý ÿ
Vcll.get.u.1.Solo Vcll.m.Dpf.
Vcll. š
m.Dpf.
Ktrbss. Ý ÿ š
m.Dpf. %
Example 2 continued
$19 rit.
ÿ
3.gr.Fl. Š
Š ÿ
!
D-Klar.
¦ Ł ²Ł
6
¹ ¾ ²Ł ½
H⎡ ⎤
2.Klar.(A) Š ¼
\\ espress.
ÿ
Bss.-Klar.(B)
%Š
$ ÿ
Cel.
%Š
\\\
¹ ²Ł Ł
3 3
Frau Š ²Ł ¼
²Ł
-lied. . Nicht spre -
$ rit.
ÿ
1.Solo-Gge.
o.Dpf.
Š
II. Gge.
Š ÿ
m.Dpf.
3 3

¦ ¦ ŁŁ ²¦ ŁŁŁ ŁŁŁ ² ŁŁŁ 1.Solo Br.
⎤
¦ Łsehr warm aber² Łzart
š ¹ ¾
H⎡ H⎡
¼ ¦Ł
Br.
m.Dpf.
\ \\
\1.Solo Vcll.
¼ −Ł ¦ Ł ¹Ł ¹ ² Ł ² Ł ¦ Ł
3
3
š ¹ ² Ł ¦ Ł Ł Ý ²² ŁŁ ¼ š
½
Vcll.
m.Dpf.
\ 3
alle get.m.Dpf.
Ktrbss. š ¹ −² ŁŁ ¦¦ ŁŁ ŁŁ Ý ¦ ² ŁŁ ½
m.Dpf. %
3
\
3
Example 3 Schoenberg, Erwartung, mm. 11–14. © Copyright 1916 by Universal Edition A.G., Vienna/UE 5362. Used by permission.
(horcht in den Wald, beklommen)

11 rascher ä = 76 (in plötzlicher Angst) ]\ [
Fr. Š ½ ¹ ²Ł ²Ł Ł ¦ Ł ¦ Ł ¹ ¦ Ł −Ł Ł ¦ Ł ¦ Ł ¦ Ł
² Ł ¦ Ł ¦ Ł
Ich fürch - te mich . . . was für schwe-re Luft her - aus-schlägt. .
[ Hrf. H⎡
¹ ý B.Kl. ²
² ŁŁ H⎡
^[
⎤
¦ ² ŁŁn¦ Ł lp pl pl pl
Ý ¹ ²Ł ¦Ł Ł ¦Ł ¦Ł ¦ Ł Ý ¼
¦ Łl −Łm Š ¾ ¦Ł Ł ¼ ²Ł ²Ł Š −−ŁŁ
−Ł ¦ ¦ ŁŁ
Fl. Hr.
fourths
\ ¦ Ł −ð
3
! Fg. ^[ ¹ ¦ Ł −Ł ¦ Ł ¦ Ł ^[ H⎡
3 ^[ ⎤ Pos.
Ý ¹ −Ł ² Łv ² Ł ¦ Ł ²Ł ²Ł
¹
Ł ¦Ł
¾ ¦Ł Ł ¹ ¦ Łv ¦ Łv ¾ ¦ Ł ²¦ ŁŁ ŁŁ ² Łl ² Ł Łl ¹ ¦ ¦ ŁŁ ŁŁ ¦ ŁŁ
¦Ł Pos.m.D. \\ l m l
v Kb. l l l ð ^[\
^[ rit. molto rit.
13
(ringt die Hände, sieht zurück)
\ 3 3
Fr. Š ¹ ¦ Ł ¦ Ł ¦ Łý ¹ ¦ Ł ² Ł 00

¦ Ł −Ł Ł .0 ² Ł ý
¦ Ł ¦ Ł ² Ł −Ł
Wie ein Sturm. der steht . . . So grau - en - voll ru - hig und leer . . .
⎤
Š ŁŁ −−ŁŁ ýý ŁŁ ¦ ¦ ŁŁ Ł .0 ð 00
! ^[ − ŁŁ ðð
\\ ^[

Ý ² ŁŁ ŁŁ ¦ ² ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ
¼ ¾ ¹
77777
Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł .0 ¼ ¦ ¦¦ ŁŁŁ 00
“atonal triads”
“atonal triad”
Example 4 Schoenberg, Erwartung, mm. 19–22. © Copyright 1916 by Universal Edition A.G., Vienna/UE 5362. Used by permission.
rit.
19 \\\
3 3 \\\
¹ ²Ł Ł ¹
Fr. Š ²Ł ¼ ²Ł Ł ¦Ł ¦Ł Ł ¦ Ł ¦ Ł ² Ł
lied . . . Nicht
spre - chen . . . es ist so süß
Kl.
3 3
m \\ sehr zart
H⎡ H⎡ H⎡ “atonal triad”
²Ł⎤ ⎤ ⎤
¹ ¦ Ł ¦ Ł Ł ý
ý
(
²Ł ²Ł
Š ¦ − ŁŁ ¦ ¦ ² ŁŁŁ ŁŁŁ ýý ¼ ¾ ¦ Ł 777
777 ² Ł )
²Ł ðð ýý
S. Br. ¦ Ł
¦ ¦− ŁŁŁ ðý
3
Br.
\\ \\ Fg. ⎤
! Vcl. ²¦ ¦ ŁŁŁ ² Ł ¦ Ł H⎡
Ý ¹ ²²− ŁŁŁ ¦ ¦ ŁŁ ŁŁ ² Ł ¼ −Łð ýýý ¦Ł ð
¦Ł Ł ¦² ŁŁ
¼ ¹

¼ ¦¦−ŁŁŁ ðð ýý
3 3
“inverted
(ã = 72) (ä = 96)
21
molto rit. sehr rasch
3 (auffahrend)
½
Fr. Š ² Ł ¦ Ł ²Ł ¦ Ł ¾ −Ł Ł Ł ¦ Ł ¦ Ł ² Ł ¦ Ł ý ¦ Ł ² Ł ¼
bei dir . . . der Mond ist in der Däm - me - rung . . .
l.H.
Łý
¼ ¹S.Gg. ² Ł ¹
¹ Ý ŁŁ ¹
Š ðð ¾ ¦ ¦¦ŁŁŁ ŁŁ ýýý
Ł
¦ ¦−ððð Ł ² Łp ² Łp Š
−ð p p
! \ H⎡ t
Ý −−ðð ¦ ¦−ŁŁŁ ŁŁ
Ł
p p ¦Ł
ðð ¦ ¦² ŁŁŁ ¦Ł ¦Ł Ł Ł Ł Łl Ł Ł ¦Ł
Kb. \\ ][
atonal triad” “atonal triads” B. Kl.
Rather than the product of purely inner impulses, Schoenberg’s more un-
ruly atonal works might be better understood as psychographs of the over-
stimulated urban subject, a “metropolitan type” who experiences an
unrelenting flux of “outer and inner impressions.”52 One of Schoenberg’s
best-known letters to Busoni presents a view of sensation inseparable from a
turbulent environment: “It is impossible for a person to have only one sensation
at a time. One has thousands simultaneously . . . this illogicality which our
senses demonstrate. . . . I should like to have in my music. It should be an
expression of feeling. . . .”53 In this passage, sensation is conceived as a stimu-
lus to feeling, not as an external realm separate from it. The works composed
according to the principles Schoenberg communicated to Busoni both regis-
ter and reproduce the sensory conditions of urban modernity. Simmel’s de-
scription of metropolitan perception is worth citing again: “the rapid
crowding-together of changing images, the sharp discontinuity between
things encompassed in a single glance, and the unexpected quality of onrush-
ing impressions.”54 With just a few changes of vocabulary from the visual to
the aural, this passage could be translated into an eloquent description of
many of Schoenberg’s atonal works, one closely resembling Anton Webern’s
comment that “there is always something new, presented with the most
rapidly shifting expression.”55 Theodor Adorno placed these arresting quali-
ties in a more troubling light, writing that in the atonal works, “the seismo-
graphical registration of traumatic shock becomes, at the same time, the
technical structural law of music.”56
Dramatically paralleling the “uprooting” (to use Simmel’s word) that
threatens the too-sensitive city dweller, Schoenberg tore music from its basis
in triadic harmony and formal convention in search of a language responsive
to every passing stimulus, whose inner or outer origin ultimately remains inde-
terminate.57 The metaphor of uprooting resonates not only with the aban-
donment of tonal harmony but also with the way that Schoenberg’s music
appeared to forfeit some elusive quality of musical depth in its attempt to ac-
cess psychological depth, just as Kandinsky’s “Improvisation” series discarded
perspectival depth in order to convey the absolute interiority of the uncon-
scious. Adorno sensed an analogy between modern painting’s elimination of
perspective and the destruction of tonal harmony, which “creates the illusion
of spatial depth” in a manner he found difficult to explain. Recalling Loos’s
polemics, Adorno contended that the flattening of perspective in both art and

53. Schoenberg, letter to Busoni, 1909, in Auner, A Schoenberg Reader, 70–71.
54. See note 21.
55. Anton Webern, “Schoenberg’s Music,” in Berg, Arnold Schönberg, trans. Barbara Z.
Schoenberg in Schoenberg and His World, ed. Frisch, 227. Webern was referring to Erwartung.
56. Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V.
Blomster (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), 42.
music results from an “anti-ornamental impulse” hostile to all forms of illu-

sion.58 The implication is that Schoenberg’s view of tonal harmony resembled
Loos’s view of ornament: both were deceptions that had to be destroyed in
search of greater truthfulness. For Adorno, this development facilitated the
“externaliz[ation] of the inner dimension,” a formula that parallels David
Joselit’s observation that in modern painting, optical depth yields to flatness as
the proper mode for conveying subjective depth.59 Interiority might be
“deep” in comparison to the external world, but it lacks that world’s sense of
extension. Paradoxically, representing depth requires its destruction in another
sphere—the technical realm where painting or music produces the illusion of
receding space.
As I mentioned earlier, the interpretation of Schoenberg as “anti-
ornamental” is a familiar one. In his discussion of the Harmonielehre’s
revisionist approach to dissonance, Carl Dahlhaus writes that “the aesthetic
motive behind this attack on the concept of ‘non-harmonic’ notes was the
abhorrence of ornament and padding which Schoenberg shared with Adolf
Loos.”60 Certainly, Loos’s presence in the Harmonielehre is recognizable from
the very first paragraph. Comparing practical instruction in composition to
lessons in carpentry, Schoenberg mused, “Whenever the carpenter introduces
flutings to enliven a smooth surface, he exhibits bad taste equal to that of most
artists, and almost as little imagination. . . .”61 Similarly, in the brief chapter on
rhythm, he criticized textbook exercises in which “a harmonic skeleton is
dressed up with passing tones, changing tones and other such ornaments. This
method calls to mind a certain master-mason architecture that sticks cheap
stucco over every smooth, straight surface. . . .”62 Schoenberg made the
source of such imagery clear at several points, mentioning his friend by name:
“This decoration with ornaments, ‘tattooing’, as Adolf Loos says, is a childish
activity.”63 In the composer’s ethical universe, the addition of embellishments
(whether in pedagogy or actual artistic practice) with no demonstrable con-
nection to the main melodic or harmonic idea was tantamount to “deceit.”
His own compositional exercises, on the other hand, he deemed “morally
superior.”64
58. Theodor W. Adorno, “Arnold Schoenberg, 1874–1951,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and
Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 161. See also idem, Philosophy of Modern
Music, 37–41.
59. David Joselit, “Notes on Surface: Toward a Genealogy of Flatness,” Art History 23
(2000): 19–34.
60. Dahlhaus, Schoenberg and the New Music, 124.
61. Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, 7.
62. Ibid., 202 (with interpolated German words deleted). This evocative image made its way
into Schoenberg’s teaching; in an essay included in Berg, Arnold Schönberg, Karl Linke recalled
that his teacher once criticized him for ornamenting an accompaniment pattern “like one sticks fa-
cades onto buildings” (trans. Barbara Z. Schoenberg in Schoenberg and His World, ed. Frisch, 251).
64. Ibid., 340, 203.
No matter how much this rhetoric echoed Loos’s, however, Schoenberg

did not propose that all musical ornaments be stripped away in order to lay
bare a purified structure. Distancing himself from techniques of embellish-
ment he considered superficial, Schoenberg showed how ornamentation
could contribute to the elaboration of musical ideas and the evolution of style.
He illustrated the former process through an analysis of a chorale from Bach’s
St. Matthew Passion, whose passing tones he insisted were not “mere orna-
ment” but genuine (if secondary) “structural component[s].” The relation-
ship of the chorale’s chords to one another, Schoenberg added in the 1922
edition of the Harmonielehre, “whether they appear in a more imposing man-
ner or are only carried along by the ‘ornamental’ movement of voices . . . is so
definite, so necessary, that these voices constituting the chords can never be
seriously interpreted as aimless decoration. . . .”65 The energy Schoenberg
devoted to justifying select ornamentation practices indicates that he did not
fully endorse Loos’s hostility to ornament. Instead, he made careful distinc-
tions between various ornamental techniques, vindicating some while repudi-
ating others.
Schoenberg’s defense of ornamentation sought to capitalize on what he
considered the evolutionary potential of ornaments—their tendency to bring
about changes in the harmonic and melodic structures they embellished. In
the Harmonielehre’s chapter on nonharmonic tones, Schoenberg observed
that dissonances initially ventured only in melodic ornaments, such as the sev-
enth over a dominant chord, soon became vital components of tonal har-
mony.66 He interpreted this process as justification for the emancipation of
dissonance: “The ornaments are only preliminary stages for the ultimate free
usage [of dissonance]. . . . Apparently we do not sense that certain ornaments
are preparing the future shape of music, and we do not know what they
might be.”67 Clearly, Schoenberg meant to retain a place for ornaments in
the tool box of contemporary composers, because they might expand musical
resources.
While Loos campaigned for the removal of meretricious architectural orna-
ments, Schoenberg recognized that musical ornaments had played (and
would continue to play) a vital role in music’s evolution and thus could not be
excised as a mere appendix to musical structure. True, both men were “anti-
ornamental” in their insistence that nothing superfluous be added to a work of
art or architecture, but Schoenberg believed that some ornaments were essen-
tial to compositional process. The difference between their views is not trivial
65. Ibid., 343–44. That Schoenberg was still interested in the issue of ornament in the early
1920s is confirmed by the 1922 essay “About Ornaments, Primitive Rhythms, Etc., and Bird
Song,” in Style and Idea, 298–311. Here, Schoenberg remarks that ornaments are not simply
superfluous “glitter” but “attract attention to the main idea” (299), and he criticizes modern
ignorance (and therefore omission) of ornaments in earlier music.
66. Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, 138, 323.
67. Ibid., 320.
when one considers the aesthetic consequences: stripping a building’s facade

of ornamental features produces a visual effect entirely different from the aural
impression delivered by Schoenberg’s atonal music, which in emancipating
dissonance also emancipated ornament. If Loos deliberately sought plainness,
Schoenberg’s music tended toward an almost unmanageable plenitude, a
surfeit of liberated tones. The sparse surfaces of Loos’s villas represented exter-
nal appearance divorced from interior essence, while Schoenberg cast aside
norms of musical appearance precisely in order to express inner feelings more
accurately.
Although it is not wholly accurate to label Schoenberg anti-ornamental,
Adorno’s intuition regarding the “flatness” of atonal music rings true in a way
that does not depend on forcing the analogy between ornament and tonal
harmony as two kinds of illusion. If, following the Harmonielehre, no emanci-
pated note can be considered superfluous or foreign to the governing har-
mony, then it becomes difficult to distinguish between ornament and
structure, figure and ground.68 In other words, Schoenberg’s collapse of sur-
face (conscious constraints) and depth (unconscious impulses) in his composi-
tional technique is reproduced in the realm of musical texture. Theorists of
atonal music have disagreed about how to handle this state of affairs. Because
he considers the tonal concept of prolongation alien to atonal music, Joseph
Straus appears to disqualify the notion of specifically atonal ornaments.69
From his Schenkerian standpoint, ornaments in tonal music prolong struc-
tural pitches, and determining what counts as a structural pitch requires above
all a clear distinction between consonance and dissonance. While Straus grants
that a referential collection (such as the sonority C–C –D) might serve as a
kind of consonance in an atonal work, he argues that no consistent rules can
be derived for distinguishing between types of prolongation and thus types of
ornamentation. Rather, Straus proposes that the concept of association should
be substituted for prolongation: given the succession of events X–Y–Z, X and
Z can be associated by, say, their pitch content, but it does not follow that Y
prolongs X. Associative relationships, he claims, still allow for the identification
of atonal middlegrounds, which are by nature motivic. Even here, though,
difficulties remain, because determining what counts as motivic in a contextual
work is by no means straightforward.70
68. On the changing relationship between foreground and background in early modernist
music, see Robert P. Morgan, “Secret Languages: The Roots of Musical Modernism,” in
Modernism: Challenges and Perspectives, ed. Monique Chefdor, Ricardo Quinones, and Albert
Wachtel, 33–53 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986).
69. Joseph Straus, “The Problem of Prolongation in Post-Tonal Music,” Journal of Music
Theory 31 (1987): 1–21.
70. This task is related to the problem of segmentation, or the identification of noteworthy
analytical (and auditory) objects. See, for example, William E. Benjamin, “Ideas of Order in
Motivic Music,” Music Theory Spectrum 1 (1979): 23–34; Christopher Hasty, “Segmentation and
Process in Post-Tonal Music,” Music Theory Spectrum 3 (1981): 54–73; and Dora A. Hanninen,
Though he too rejects the possibility of prolongation in atonal music, Jack

Boss attempts to salvage the concept of ornament by expanding on the work
of Joel Lester and others.71 Boss reads Schoenberg’s 1932 lecture on the Four
Songs, Op. 22, for evidence that the composer possessed at least a rudimen-
tary notion of atonal ornamentation. In the lecture, Schoenberg referred to
the “principal” and “subsidiary” notes (Hauptnoten and Nebennoten) of
melodic lines and suggested that three lines from the song “Mach mich zum
Wächter deiner Weiten” share a roughly similar group of principal notes. In
each case, these notes (which may be interrupted by Nebennoten) form
segments that descend by half or whole step (F–E–D–C , D –C–B, and
E–E –C ). Schoenberg remarked that each melodic line begins with a similar
umschreibenden Figur, which, following Claudio Spies’s translation, Boss calls
an “ornamented figure.” Based on Schoenberg’s example, Boss identifies a
“basic motive” at work in the song that consists of “all the two-interval suc-
cessions combining ordered pitch intervals -1, +1, -2, and +2, where both in-
tervals descend or ascend.” In other words, any three notes moving in the
same direction by whole or half step qualify as motivic.72 While a listener
might benefit from attending to such figures as a continuous thread running
through the song, it seems excessive to propose, as Boss does, that all other
kinds of motion should be conceived as “ornamenting” this highly general-
ized basic motive. Schoenberg’s adjective umschreibenden is derived from the
verb umschreiben, whose more straightforward meanings are “to rewrite,” “to
rephrase,” or even “to express something in different terms.” What Schoen-
berg has in mind is a technique of variation—“rewriting”—that does not re-
quire an accompanying framework of structural levels, despite Boss’s (and
Straus’s) commitment to maintaining just such a framework.73
Nevertheless, Boss admits that the concept of depth has limited applicabil-
ity to the atonal repertoire. “We have no need for the term ‘background’
when analyzing Schoenberg’s atonal music in his own terms,” he writes.
“Even ‘middleground’ may be unnecessary,” Boss continues; “none of
Schoenberg’s own analyses considers ornamentation on levels higher than
what Schenker would call foreground.”74 But the concept of atonal middle-
grounds has proven hard to resist, and most theoretical studies of the reper-
toire have followed Allen Forte’s lead by attempting to uncover hidden
“Orientations, Criteria, Segments: A General Theory of Segmentation for Music Analysis,”

Journal of Music Theory 45 (2001): 345–433.
71. Jack Boss, “Schoenberg on Ornamentation and Structural Levels,” Journal of Music
Theory 38 (1994): 187–216.
72. Ibid., 199.
73. Haimo writes that Schoenberg’s discussion of the song “show[s] how the melody evolves
through a flexible process of developing variation” (“Atonality, Analysis, and the Intentional
Fallacy,” 175–76).
74. Boss, “Schoenberg on Ornamentation,” 210–11.
motivic structures.75 Alan Lessem has written that since Schoenberg arrived at
his musical materials by intuition, “the formal relationships created by them,
rather than sounding on the surface of the music, will be found to exist buried
in its deeper tissues.”76 Such claims too easily assume that an “unconscious
logic” governs the composer’s music, one accessible to analysis and presum-
ably identical to the logic Schoenberg hypothesized in the Harmonielehre,
even though two years prior to the book’s publication he justified his style to
Busoni as the pursuit of a radical illogicality.77
While the existence and precise nature of this unconscious logic will always
be open to debate, I would question whether the essential character of
Schoenberg’s atonal works lies in what they conceal.78 Caught up in a “frenzy
of confession,” as the commentator cited earlier put it, Schoenberg attempted
to place his unconscious impulses on display by violating the conventions that
traditionally accommodated the interior realm of feeling to the exterior realm
of appearance. Much of the music that resulted traced the contours of an
“unimaginable psychic state” (Simmel’s phrase) resembling that of the city-
dweller who carelessly abandoned his or her reserve.79 Considered in this
light, it is not surprising that Schoenberg found it difficult to continue along
this compositional path. Over the course of the next decade, he would reaf-
firm the values of interiority and subjective integrity jeopardized by the exhibi-
tionism of the atonal works.
Urban Motion and Spiritual Crisis
Schoenberg’s effort to salvage the inner sphere began in a time-honored fash-

ion with a period of soul-searching and theological speculation. His sense of
spiritual dissatisfaction, like his faith in unconscious inspiration, found an echo
in the writings of Kandinsky, whose 1912 treatise Concerning the Spiritual in
Art complained of the “nightmare of materialism” and the “despair born
75. See Allan Forte, The Structure of Atonal Music (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale
University Press, 1973).
76. Lessem, “Schönberg and the Crisis of Expressionism,” 435.
78. Critics of pitch-class set analysis have argued that there is little evidence to support the
claim that Schoenberg composed consciously with such sets, while its defenders have insisted that
it makes little difference in the end whether the musical relationships established by analysis were
“put there” by the composer or not (see Haimo’s discussion of this issue in “Atonality, Analysis,
and the Intentional Fallacy”). Pondering the future of analyses of atonal music, Robert Morgan
takes a circumspect view: doubting that analysts will ever hit upon a theoretical model equal to
those available for the analysis of tonal music, he writes that such a discovery would in any case
run counter to “the essential nature of this music,” its attempt to “speak in an unknown and enig-
matic tongue that largely defies rational comprehension.” See “Secret Languages,” 53, 49.
79. Not all of the atonal works display this kind of “frenzy”; the third of the Five Orchestral
Pieces, for example, is notably serene, as is the last of the Piano Pieces, Op. 19.
of unbelief ” afflicting the contemporary soul. Every segment of the popula-

tion, Kandinsky claimed, “hungers, consciously or unconsciously, for adequate
spiritual satisfactions.” To counteract the “modern sense of insecurity” (Kan-
dinsky’s emphasis) produced by the recognition that the truths of religion, sci-
ence, and morality are not fixed but fluctuate over time, he recommended a
search within: “When outer supports threaten to fall, man withdraws his gaze
from externals and turns it inwards.”80
As early as 1911, Schoenberg started to look for a suitable musical vehicle
to sustain his quest for renewed faith.81 He considered various schemes involv-
ing voices and orchestra, including an oratorio with his own text, a setting of
Strindberg’s semiautobiographical Jacob Wrestles, a multievening stage work
based on Balzac’s Seraphita, and an oratorio with a text he attempted to solicit
from Richard Dehmel.82 Writing to Dehmel in 1912, Schoenberg described
his idea of the project:
For a long time I have been wanting to write an oratorio on the following sub-
ject: modern man, having passed through materialism, socialism, and anarchy
and, despite having been an atheist, still having in him some residue of ancient
faith (in the form of superstition), wrestles with God (see also Strindberg’s
Jacob Wrestling) and finally succeeds in finding God and becoming religious.
Learning to pray!83
Initially, the corollary to Kandinsky’s inward turn—the solution to “material-

ism” and other modern foes—was to be prayer, man’s internal conversation
with God. In the end, prayer turned out to be just one component among
many in the plans Schoenberg devised around 1914 for an enormous religio-
philosophical choral symphony (which he never completed). The elaborate
program culminated in a movement entitled “Der Glaube des ‘Desillusion-
ierton’ ” (“The Faith of the Disillusioned One”), but Schoenberg eventually
severed the text he drafted for the symphony movement and made it a sepa-
rate work, the oratorio Die Jakobsleiter. After completing the text in May
1917, he began writing the music at a furious pace, only to be interrupted
by several months’ service in the Austrian army. Later attempts to take up
80. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. Michael Sadleir et al. (New
York: Wittenborn, 1947), 24, 27, 31, 33.
81. According to Stuckenschmidt, Schoenberg spoke to Berg in 1911 about setting Jacob
Wrestles to music (Schoenberg, 235).
82. On the complicated chronology of Die Jakobsleiter, and on the influence of Balzac and
Strindberg on the conception of these works, see ibid., 233–48; Walter Bailey, Programmatic
Elements in the Works of Schoenberg (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1984), 79–118; and
Simms, Atonal Music, chap. 7. See also Jean Christensen, “Arnold Schoenberg’s Oratorio Die
Jakobsleiter” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1979); and Jennifer Shaw,
“Schoenberg’s Choral Symphony, Die Jakobsleiter, and Other Wartime Fragments: Genesis of the
gearbeitete Aesthetic” (PhD diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 2002).
83. Schoenberg, letter to Richard Dehmel, 1912, quoted in Bailey, Programmatic Elements,
80.
composition of the work were short-lived, and the oratorio was finally aban-
doned in 1922.84
With a scenario depicting the angel Gabriel’s struggle to unite the multi-
tude of human souls under God before they die, Die Jakobsleiter has most of-
ten been linked to Seraphita’s narrative of spiritual discovery and the mystical
theology of Emanuel Swedenborg it propounds.85 But the presence of “One
Wrestling” (Ein Ringender) in Schoenberg’s cast of characters indicates that
Strindberg’s Jacob Wrestles, which the composer considered setting in 1911
and which also bears the mark of Swedenborgian mysticism, had by no means
faded into the background.86 It would not be the first time the playwright’s
influence touched Schoenberg’s music: Adorno noted the similarity between
the “lonely man” of Strindbergian drama and the isolated subject of musical
Expressionism, a subject he found crystallized in the protagonist of Die glück-
liche Hand (1913).87 Jacob Wrestles, Strindberg’s chronicle of several months
spent alone in Paris, sets the author’s own spiritual crisis into relief against the
ceaseless activity of the city’s nearly two million residents. The psychological
impact of urban living is felt in both the paradoxical loneliness of city life and
its stifling routines. The narrator describes his solitary perambulations around
Paris in meticulous detail, from his periodic encounters with the “torrent” of
pedestrians and vehicles to his fear of horse-drawn omnibuses. Recounting
the “vicious circle” of his daily walk, he complains that “my life is so thor-
oughly enclosed in the frame of this circuit, that if I once take the liberty to go
another way, I go wrong, as if I had lost fragments of myself, my recollections,
my thoughts, and feelings of self-coherence.”88 This constrained yet aimless
movement seems at once to sustain and threaten the narrator’s fragile subjec-
84. Schoenberg sketched a few revisions to the work in 1944 but made little progress. After
the composer’s death, Winfried Zillig prepared a performing version of the unfinished first half, a
task that involved completing some passages and realizing the orchestration throughout (see
Simms, Atonal Music, 169).
85. Simms, for example, comments that “Balzac’s novel is the central literary model for the
work” (Atonal Music, 168). He mentions several other possible sources for the oratorio’s collec-
tion of ideas, but omits Jacob Wrestles. Incidentally, it is not entirely clear where Gabriel’s inter-
locutors stand on the spectrum of life and death. In the spirit of the work’s title, I have chosen to
consider them still resident on earth. Espousing an alternative view, Walter Bailey writes that Die
Jakobsleiter “concerns the destination of the souls of the dead once they have responded to the
summons of the angel Gabriel. Some are accepted into higher spheres and some are sent back to
earth in new incarnations” (Programmatic Elements, 97).
86. Stuckenschmidt writes that Jacob Wrestles “moved Schoenberg deeply and stimulated
him creatively for years. He spoke about it to his most trusted friends, not only Berg and Webern,
but also Erwin Stein, Heinrich Jalowetz, and Karl Linke” (Schoenberg, 234). In 1913, Schoen-
berg’s library held twenty-eight volumes of Strindberg’s works, compared with twelve by Balzac
(ibid., 183).
87. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 43. John Crawford notes resemblances between Die
glückliche Hand and Strindberg’s play To Damascus in his “Die glückliche Hand: Schoenberg’s
Gesamtkunstwerk,” Musical Quarterly 60 (1974): 583–601.
88. August Strindberg, “Wrestling Jacob,” in Legends: Autobiographical Sketches (London:
Melrose, 1912), 163, 164.
tivity. Even his temporary escape from routine through a series of mystical en-
counters in a secluded garden does not succeed in lifting him out of his spiri-
tual torpor.
Compared to Seraphita’s remote Nordic setting, the bustling urban envi-
ronment of Strindberg’s novella seems better suited to the diverse group of
characters who encounter Gabriel in Die Jakobsleiter. Their dispositions range
widely—some rejoice or doubt, others are malcontent, indifferent, resigned.
Schoenberg remarked to Dehmel that in his projected oratorio, “the mode of
speech, the mode of thought, the mode of expression, should be that of mod-
ern man; the problems treated should be those that harass us.”89 One of those
problems is movement itself, a theme that arises in Die Jakobsleiter with the
very first words of Schoenberg’s Gabriel: “Whether right, left, forward or
backward, uphill or downhill, one has to go on without asking what lies before
or behind.” Many commentators, among them Webern, have interpreted the
angel’s line as a premonition of twelve-tone musical space, the best-known de-
scription of which is found in Schoenberg’s essay “Composition with Twelve
Tones,” first drafted in 1934 and expanded in 1941.90 In the later version (but
not the earlier), Schoenberg famously described his new musical space in di-
rectional terms: “In this space, as in Swedenborg’s heaven (described in
Balzac’s Seraphita) there is no absolute down, no right or left, forward or
backward.”91 Linking this passage to Die Jakobsleiter became customary once
Schoenberg began to craft the now-familiar narrative that positioned the ora-
torio as a stepping stone to the twelve-tone method. Around 1948, for exam-
ple, Schoenberg recalled how he had realized a few years earlier that Die
Jakobsleiter’s beginning qualified as a “real twelve-tone composition” (Ex. 5).
The piece opens with an ostinato characterized by large melodic leaps and
abrupt shifts in direction, one version of the “row of six tones” (C –D–E–F–
G–A ) Schoenberg claimed was his initial creative thought.92 Above the osti-
nato, a series of rising, sustained notes completes the chromatic. Commenting
89. Schoenberg, letter to Dehmel (1912), in Bailey, Programmatic Elements, 80.
90. Stuckenschmidt, Schoenberg, 243. Jennifer Shaw also deems Gabriel’s opening words a
“description of heaven.” See her “Rethinking Schoenberg’s Composition of Die Jakobsleiter,”
Theory and Practice 18 (1993): 98. The 1934 version of Schoenberg’s essay, known as “Vortrag/
12TK/Princeton,” can be found in Claudio Spies’s article of the same name in Perspectives of New
Music 13 (1974): 58–136. Spies presents both the original German and an English translation
(some of which is Schoenberg’s own) side by side. None of the passages I quote has an accompa-
nying translation authored by Schoenberg; in some cases, I have altered Spies’s translation, and
thus cite pages where the original German can be found. For the 1941 version of the essay, writ-
ten in English for a lecture at UCLA, see “Composition with Twelve Tones (1),” in Style and
Idea, 214–45.
91. Arnold Schoenberg, “Composition with Twelve Tones (1),” 223.
92. Schoenberg, “Composition with Twelve Tones (2)” (circa 1948), in Style and Idea,
247–48. See also the “Letter from Arnold Schoenberg on the Origin of the Twelve-Tone Method
of Composition,” in Nicholas Slonimsky, Music since 1900, 5th ed. (New York: Schirmer Books,
1994), 1029–30. Shaw’s “Rethinking Schoenberg’s Composition” offers sufficient evidence to
disprove Schoenberg’s claim.
Example 5 Schoenberg, Die Jakobsleiter, mm. 1–16. Used by permission of Belmont Music Publishers.
Sehr rasch (â = 112)

Š ./ ¼ ÿ ý
¦Ðý − ÐÐ ýý −¦ ÐÐÐ ýý
! [[ ^[ [ ^[ ^[ ^[
Ý / ²Ł ¦ Łl ² Ł ¹ Łl ² Ł ¹ Łl ² Ł ¹ Łl ² Ł ¹
. ¦ Łl ¦ Ł ¦ Łl ² Ł Łl Ł ¦ Łl ² Ł Łl Ł ¦ Łl ² Ł Ł Ł ¦ Łl ² Ł
5 −Ð ý 3 3 3
²¦ ÐÐÐ ýýý ² ÐÐÐ ýýý
ÐÐ ýý ý ¹ ¦Ł
Š ÐÐÐ ýýý Ðý − ÐÐÐ ýý ² Ł ¦ Ł ¦ Ł ¦ Ł ¦ Ł ¦ Ł ²¦ ŁŁ ¦ ŁŁ ¦² ŁŁ −¦ ŁŁ ŁŁ ² ŁŁ Ł
−Ł − Ł
¦ Ł
! ^[ ^[ ²Ł ¦ Ł
² Ł − ¦ ŁŁ ² ŁŁ −Ł Ł −Ł ² Ł −ŁŁ ¦² ŁŁ −Ł Ł −Ł ²¦ ŁŁ −ŁŁ ¦² ŁŁ −Ł − ŁŁ ² ŁŁ
Ý Łl ² Ł ¹ Łl ² Ł ¦ Ł ¦ Ł −Ł ¦ Ł ¦ Ł ¦ ŁŁ −ŁŁ Ł Ł Ł ¦Ł Ł Ł ¦Ł Ł Ł
Ł ¦ Łl ² Ł Ł
3 3 3
Łl Łl
8va
3
3 3 3
8
¦Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ² Ł Ł Ł −¦ ðŁ
Ł Ł ¦ Ł Ł Ł − ŁŁ ŁŁŁ Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ŁŁ Ł − ŁŁ Ł
Ł ²Ł Ł ¦ Ł ²Ł
−¦ ŁŁ ¦ Ł ¦ Ł ¦ Ł ¦ Ł ¦¦ ŁŁ − ŁŁŁ ¦ Ł ¦ Ł ¦² ŁŁ Ł ŁŁ − ŁŁŁ ¦ Ł ¦ Ł ¦² ŁŁ Ł ŁŁ
Š ² Ł − Ł ¦ Ł ² ŁŁ Ł ² Ł − Ł ¦ Ł ²ŁŁ Ł ² Ł − Ł ¦ Ł ²ŁŁ Ł −Ł ¦ Ł Ł ¦Ł Ł ¦ ŁŁ Ł Ł Ł ŁŁ ŁŁ Ł
3 3
3
3
ŁŁ 3 3 3 3
! ¦ ¦² ŁŁŁ Ł Ł ¦ ŁŁ Ł Ł
−ŁŁ ¦² ŁŁ −ŁŁŁ ŁŁ ¦² ŁŁŁ ² Ł −ŁŁ ¦² ŁŁ −ŁŁŁ − ŁŁ − ² ŁŁŁ Ł
[[ ²Ł
Ý Ł Ł ¦Ł ¦Ł Š ¦ Ł
² Ł ¦ Ł ¦ Ł ² ŁŁŁ Ł ŁŁŁ Ł Ł ŁŁ Ł Ł ŁŁŁ Ł
¦ Ł ² Ł ŁŁ Ł Ł Ł Ł ŁŁ ŁŁ Ł Ł
¦Ł ²Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł
Example 5 continued
streng im Takt
(scharf und trocken)
10 [
Ý
Gabriel
ÿ ½ ¼
− ¹
¹ −
Ob rechts, ob
(8va) −Ł ¦ Ł ² Ł 8va
− ŁŁŁ Ł ¦Ł −Ł ¦ Ł ¦Ł ¦ Ł ¦ Ł − Ł ¦ Ł − Ł ¦−¦ ŁŁŁ Ý ¦ Łný
Š −Ł ¦ Ł ² Ł ¦ Ł −Ł ¦Ł ¦Ł ¹ ¦ Łn¦ Łn
3 3
¦Ł ¦ Ł −Ł ¦ Ł ¦ Ł ² Ł ¦ Ł ² Ł ¦Ł ¦Ł \
! n
^[ ¦Ł
Ł −Ł Ý ¦ ¦ ŁŁ
¦Ł ½ ²ð ¹ ¦ Ł ¹ ¦ Ł
Š ² ŁŁ ¹ −¦ ŁŁ ¼ ¦Ł ¦ Ł ýý −¦ ŁŁ
−¦ ¦ ŁŁŁ
¦Ł −Ł ð
12 3 3 3
¦ ¦ ¦ ¦ ¦ ² ² −
Gabriel
Ý ¹ ¼
¦ ² ý ¦ ² ¹ − ² ¹ ¼ ¹ −
links, vor - wärts o - der ruck - wärts, berg - auf o- der berg - ab— man hat
m ² Łm ² Łm ð
Ý ¦Ł ¹ ² Łm ¦ Łm ¦ Łm ¦ Łm ¦ Łm ¦ Łm ¦ Ł ¦ Łm
¼ ² Łm ¼
3 3 3 3
! 3
3 n
Ý −−ŁŁ ¹ ¼ −Ł ¹ ¼
¦ ¦ ðð ²Ł
¹ −¦ ŁŁ −¦ ðð
n
ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ −−ŁŁ ¦ ² ŁŁ
Ł
^[

^[
Example 5 continued
14 3
Ý ¦ ý ¦ ² ¦ − ¦ ¦ ² ² ¦ ¦ ² ¦
²
Gabriel ¼ ¼ ¦ − − .0
wei - ter - zu - ge - hen, oh - ne zu fra - gen, was vor o - der hin - ter ei - nem liegt. Es soll ver -
Łln ² Ł n [\ ¼
Ý ¦ Łl −Łp ¦ Ł ¦ Ł ½ ¼ ¦Ł Ý ¦ Ł ¦ Ł ²Ł
Š ðð ððð ýýý ² Ł ¦ Ł .0
! − Ðn ² Łm
[ [
ln l p n \
Ý ¦² ŁŁ ¦ ¦ ŁŁ ²² ŁŁ ¦ ¦ ŁŁ ¦ ¦ ŁŁ −−ŁŁ ¼ ¦Ł ¼ ½
Ðný − Ł
ÐÐ ðð ýý
ðý .0
on the similarity between the intervallic contour of the sustained notes and the
Soul’s melody heard in the final ensemble, Jennifer Shaw proposes that the
work’s beginning contains a “premonition” of the goal toward which Gabriel
is pointing: life after death. Tracing the origin of the ostinato’s pitches to a
1914 sketch intended for the religious symphony—a setting of Dehmel’s
poem “Aeonische Stunde”—Shaw suggests that the hexachord retains the
connotations of ecstatic singing found in the poem.93 Also concerned with the
prospect of transcendence, Richard Taruskin has written that Die Jakobsleiter’s
orchestral introduction signals an impending “occult revelation.” Taruskin in-
terprets Schoenberg’s bid to fill pitch-class space with two symmetrical hexa-
chords as a realization of the homogeneity Seraphita attributed to heaven.94
Heard as a preface to the angel’s dispiriting words, however, the oratorio’s
opening measures evoke a state of uncertainty at odds with a vision of heaven,
a state more consonant with Strindberg’s Jacob Wrestles than Balzac’s
Seraphita. Just before Gabriel begins to sing, the ostinato is dispersed into a
cascade of fragments evocative of the restless multitudes. Urging the crowd
onward regardless of direction, Gabriel conjures up an image of arbitrary, even
blind movement (“Whether right, left, forward or backward, uphill or down-
hill, one has to go on . . . ”). The score calls for the singer to deliver his words
“strictly in tempo” and in a “shrill and dry” manner. The shape of the angel’s
line—with large leaps illustrating sudden changes in direction (especially at
“oder rückwärts” and “bergab”)—retroactively casts a negative light on the
ostinato’s disjunct contour. More harassing than soothing, Gabriel withholds
a glimpse of heaven in order to mimic, even mock, the erratic motion of the
urban masses. “Onward? Where? How long?” the chorus asks. An answer may
come, but not yet.
The crowd’s response to Gabriel alludes to the frenetic activity of urban life
and an accompanying lack of spiritual grounding. The litany of metropolitan
woes ranges from pain and fear of violence to self-loathing, an overpowering
sense of futility, and distrust of hard-won material comforts.
Der unerträgliche Druck . . . ! The intolerable pressure . . . !
Die schwere Last . . . ! The heavy burden . . . !
Welche schrecklichen Schmerzen . . . ! What fearful pains . . . !
Brennende Sehnsucht . . . ! Burning longing . . . !
Heiße Begierden . . . ! Hot desires . . . !
Schein der Erfüllung . . . ! Illusion of fulfillment . . . !
Trostlose Einsamkeit . . . ! Inconsolable loneliness . . . !
Zwang der Formeln . . . ! Duress of formulae . . . !
Vernichtung des Willens . . . ! Annihilation of the will . . . !
93. Shaw, “Rethinking Schoenberg’s Composition,” 98, 100.

94. Taruskin, “Scriabin and the Superhuman,” 354, 349. The ostinato’s hexachord (C –D–
E–F–G–A ) is symmetrical around the axis between E and F, while the hexachord created by the
sustained notes (F –A–B –B–C–E ) is symmetrical around the axis between B and B .
Lügen um Gluck . . . ! Lies for the sake of happiness . . . !

Mord, Raub, Blut, Wunden . . . ! Murder, robbery, blood, wounds . . . !
Besitz, Schönheit, Genuß . . . ! Possession, beauty, enjoyment . . . !
Freude am Eitlen, Selbstgefühl . . . ! Pleasure in futility, self-esteem . . . !
Heimliche Stunde, süßes Behagen . . . ! Intimate hours, sweet delights . . . !
Heitere Tatkraft und glückliches Bounding energy and successful
Wirken . . . ! action . . . !95
The musical representation of Einsamkeit (“loneliness”) in the chorus also

befits an urban setting (Ex. 6). At the line “illusion of fulfillment,” forte and
fortissimo recitations of the text by several vocal groups give way to the triple-
piano murmuring on the words “inconsolable loneliness.” The dynamic level
sinks again to an almost inaudible pppp at the repetition of the line, which is
sung on the single pitch F and recalls the chant-like delivery of the chorus’s
opening words (“the intolerable pressure”). The combination of unison and
choral texture at this point suggests that the loneliness in question is the pecu-
liar urban solitude felt among the crowd, a theme hinted at in Schoenberg’s
early song “Am Wegrand” and, later, in Erwartung.96 As Strindberg put it in a
companion essay to Jacob Wrestles, “My loneliness, which I find terrible in
itself, is still more oppressive in the restaurant among a noisy crowd of people
twice a-day.”97
The music comes almost to a halt at the end of measure 40 thanks to a brief
ritardando, as if loneliness might destroy any remaining shred of willpower
among the multitudes. But a grim sense of resolve sets in as the music acceler-
ates back into tempo and returns to forte for the lines “duress of formulae”
and “annihilation of the will.” The eighth-note figure in the cello, which helps
to propel the music forward, reaffirms that the piece’s principal hexachordal
motive carries mundane rather than transcendent implications at this point in
the oratorio. The figure begins with a segment of the ostinato (F, E, G , G)
reproduced at pitch, while the rest of the phrase (F , B , A and A , C, B) se-
quences the segment’s last three notes (E, G , G). Here, the motive (and the
technique of sequencing) is explicitly associated with formulaic activity and
95. Translation by Lionel Salter, included in the 2004 recording of Die Jakobsleiter, with the
Rundfunkchor Berlin and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, conducted Kent Nagano,
compact disc, Harmonia Mundi HMC 801821.
96. See Adorno’s discussion of the song (text by John Henry Mackay) and its quotation in
Erwartung as the Woman utters the words “Thousands of people march past,” the first line of
“Am Wegrand” (Philosophy of Modern Music, 46–47). The final lines of the poem read:
Longing fills the realms of life,
Left empty by fulfillment,
And so I stand at the edge of the road,
While the crowd flows past,
Until—blinded by the burning sun—
My tired eyes close.
Note the textual parallel with Die Jakobsleiter’s “illusion of fulfillment.”
97. Strindberg, “In Paris,” in Legends, 144.
Example 6 Schoenberg, Die Jakobsleiter, mm. 36–43. Used by permission of Belmont Music
Publishers.
$36 [[
½ ½ ²
S Š ¼
[[
Schein
MS Š ½ ½ ¼ ²
[[
Schein
A Š ½ ½ ¼ ¦
Chor I [¦ −Ž
Schein
½ ¦
3
¦
3
¦
T Š
+ Schein der Er - fül - lung . . .
[¦ ² −Ž
Ý ¦
3 3
Bar.
½ ¦
[Schein der Er - fül
−Ž
- lung . . .
Ý ½ ²
3
¦
3
¦
B
% ²
$
Schein der Er - fül
[[- ² lung . . .
S Š ½ ½ ¼
[[
Schein
MS Š ½ ½ ¼ ²
[[
Schein
A Š ½ ½ ¼ ¦
[¦
Schein
Chor II
¦
3 −Ž 3
T Š ½ ¦ ¦
+ Schein der Er - fül - lung . . .
[¦ ² −Ž
Ý ¦
3 3
Bar.
½ ¦
[Schein der Er - fül
−Ž
- lung . . .
Ý ½ ²
3
¦
3
¦
B
% ²
¦ ¦² ÐÐÐ ýýý
Schein der Er - fül - lung . . .
¦Ł
− Ł ¦ −ŁŁ ¦ ²¦ ŁŁŁ −¦ ŁŁ ¦ −¦ ŁŁŁ ¦ −¦ ŁŁŁ ²¦¦ ŁŁŁ − ¦ ŁŁ ½
Š ¦ Ł
−¦ ŁŁ ²¦ ŁŁ ¦ Ł
! ¼
[[ l l l l l l l l ¦ Łl
3
Ý
3
3
ÿ
Example 6 continued
$37 ² ² ¦ ½
S Š ¼ ¦ ¼
der Er - fül - lung . . .
Š ¼ ² ¦ ¦ ¼ ½
MS
¦
A Š ¼ ¦ ¦ ¦ ¼ ½
¦
Chor I der Er - fül - lung . . .
¦ ¦ ¦
3
T Š ½ ½ ¼
+ Schein der Er -
Bar.
Ý ½ ½ − − − −
3
¦
Ý
3
½ ¼ − − − − ¦
B
%
$ ² ² ¦ ½
S Š ¼ ¦ ¼
Š ¼ ² ¦ ¦ ¼ ½
MS
¦
A Š ¼ ¦ ¦ ¦ ¼ ½
¦
Chor II der Er - fül - lung . . .
T Š ÿ
+
Bar.
Ý ÿ
Ý ÿ
B
%
¦ ¦¦ ððð ²¦² ÐÐÐ
¦ð
Š ½ ½
! [\ [
Ý ½ Š ¼ −−¦ ððð −¦¦ ŁŁŁ
Example 6 continued
$38 ½ \\\ ¦ −
3
S Š ½ ¼ ²
Schein der Er -
\\\ − 3
MS Š ½ ½ ¼ ¦ ¦
\\\
Schein der Er -
3
A Š ½ ½ ¼ ¦ ¦ ¦
Chor I Schein der Er -
T Š ¦ − ¼ ½ ½
+ -fül - lung . . .
Bar.
Ý ÿ
Ý ÿ
B
%
$ \\\ ¦
S Š ¼ ¼ ¦ − ¦ ¹ ² ¹
Trost - lo - se Ein - sam -
\\\
¹ ¹
MS Š ¼ ¦ ¼ − − − ¦
Trost - lo - se Ein - sam -
\\\
¹ ¹
A Š ¼ ¦ ¼ − − ¦ ¦

Chor II
\\\ Trost - lo - se Ein - sam -
T Š ¼ ¦ ¼ ¦ − − ¹
¦
¹
+ Trost - lo - se Ein - sam -
Bar.
Ý ÿ
Ý ÿ
B
%
ð Ł −Ł −Ł ¦Ł
Š ¦− ðð ²¦ ŁŁ −−¦ ŁŁŁ
! \\
Ý ² ¦ ðð ¦ ¦ ŁŁ
Š −ŁŁŁ −¦¦ ŁŁŁ −Ł
Example 6 continued
$39 ¦ − ½ ½
S Š ¼
-fül - lung . . .
¦ − ½ ½
MS Š ¼
-fül - lung . . .
A Š − ¦ ¼ ½ ½
-fül - lung . . .
Chor I
T Š ÿ
+ \\\\
Ý ½ ½
Bar.
¦Ž
\\\\
Trost -
Ý ½ ½
B
% ¦Ž
Trost -
$
S Š ¦ ¹ ¼ ½ ½
-keit . . .
MS Š − ¹ ¼ ½ ½
-keit . . .
Š ¹ ¼ ½ ½
−
A
Chor II -keit . . .
T Š ¦ ¹ ¼ ½ ½
+ -keit . . .
\\\\
Ý ½ ½
Bar.
¦Ž
\\\\
Trost -
Ý ½ ½
B
% ¦Ž
Trost -
¦Ł
¦Ł ²− −ðŁŁ ¦Ł −Ł ¦Ł
Š ¦Ł − Ł −−¦ ŁŁŁ −ŁŁ ¦ − ŁŁ
! n
n
¼
\\
Ý ²Ł −Ł −Ł ¦¦ ŁŁ ¼ ²¦ ŁŁ
¦Ł
Example 6 continued
$40 ÿ
poco rit.
S Š
MS Š ÿ
A Š ÿ
Chor I
T Š ÿ
+
Ý ¹ ¹ ¹
Bar.
¼
- lo - se Ein - sam - keit . . .
Ý ¹ ¹ ¹
B
% ¼
$ ÿ
S Š
MS Š ÿ
A Š ÿ
Chor II
T Š ÿ
+
Ý ¹ ¹ ¹
Bar.
¼
Ý ¹ ¹ ¹
B
% ¼
−ð
²Ł ¦Ð
¦ − ŁŁ poco rit.
Š − ŁŁ ¦Ł ¦ ² ŁŁ ¦ ¦ ŁŁ ¦ ¦ ŁŁ ²² ŁŁ
! −¦ ŁŁ −¦ ŁŁ −¦ ŁŁ
l l l
Ý ² ŁŁ ²−ŁŁ ¦ ¦ ŁŁ
Example 6 continued
$41 poco accel.

ÿ
S Š
MS Š ÿ
A Š ÿ
Chor I
T Š ÿ
+
Bar.
Ý ÿ
Ý ÿ
B
%
$ ÿ
S Š
MS Š ÿ
A Š ÿ
Chor II
T Š ÿ
+
Bar.
Ý ÿ
Ý ÿ
B
%
poco accel.
¹ ²Ł ¦Ł −Ł
Š¦Ł¦ Ł −− ŁŁ ¦ ¦ ŁŁ −− ŁŁ ¦Ł
! ¦Ł
¦Ł
− Łl ¼ ¦Ł ²Ł − Ł ¦¦ ŁŁ
^[ [ cresc.
Ý −−ŁŁ ¹ ¹
¦ Łl ¦Ł [ ¦ Ł ²Ł
cello
¦Ł
² Ł −Ł
¦ Ł
−Ł ¦ Ł
¦−¦ ŁŁŁ ²¦ ŁŁ
²Ł
Example 6 continued
$42 a tempo
ÿ
S Š
MS Š ÿ
A Š ÿ
Chor I [ ¦Ž
T Š ½ − ¦
+
[
Zwang der For -
− ¦ −Ž
Bar.
Ý ½
Zwang der For -
[
Ý ½ ¼ ¹ −Ž
B
% ¦
Ver - nich -
$ ÿ
S Š
MS Š ÿ
A Š ÿ
Chor II [
T Š ½ ½ ¼ − ¦
+ Zwang der
[
Ý ½ ½ − ¦
Bar. ¼
Zwang der
[
Ý ¹ ² ¦ Ž
² ¦
B
% ¼
Ver - nich - tung des
a tempo
−¦ ðð
Š ½ ½
! Š
−Ł
¹ ¼
p
−Łp −Ł ¦ Łp ¦ Łp −−ŁŁl ¦ ¦ ŁŁl
¼
o o
¹ ¹
Ý ¦ Ł ¦ð −Łð ¦Ł
¦− ŁŁ ¦¦ ŁŁ ¦ −¦ ŁŁŁ ²Ł
¼ ¹ ¦ Ł − ð ²Ł
¦ Ł −Ł ¦Ł

Example 6 continued
$43 [ ¦Ž
¹
S Š ¼ ¦ ¦ −
[
Ver - nich - tung des
MS Š ½ ½ ¼ ¦ ²
[
Zwang der
A Š ½ ½ ¼ ¦ ¦
Chor I
² ½ ½
Zwang der
T Š
+
- meln . . .
−
Bar.
Ý ½ ½
- meln . . .
¦ ²
Ý − − ½
B
%
$ - tung des Wil - lens . . .
[
Š ½ ¹ ¦Ž
S ¼ ²
[ Ver - nich -
MS Š ½ ¦ ² ²Ž
[
Zwang der For -
A Š ½ ¦ ² ¦Ž
Chor II
¦ −
Zwang der For
½ ½
-
T Š ¼
+ For - meln . . .
Bar.
Ý ¦ ¦ ¼ ½ ½
For - meln . . .
¦ ¦
Ý ½ ½
B
%
Wil - lens . . .
¦Ł
ŁŁ ¦ð Ł
Š −² ŁŁ ²Ł ¦ Ł −Ł
! ¦ Łl l
Š ¦ Ł ¦−ŁŁ ¹ ¦ Ł Ł ¦ Ł ² Ł ² Ł ¦ ² ðð
o o
u u
¦Ł
Ý Ł −Ł − Ł
¦ Ł ¦ Ło ² Ło ¦ ¦ ŁŁl ¦ ² ŁŁl
Ł ¦ Ł ²Ł ¼ Š
−Ł −Ł
u u
self-annihilation. The textual link between loneliness and formula can be

traced directly to Jacob Wrestles, where the main character’s solitude is con-
stantly apparent along the unvarying route of his daily walk and during the
meals he takes alone, in the same restaurant, day after day. Like Strindberg’s
protagonist, Die Jakobsleiter’s multitudes are unable to transcend their spiri-
tual emptiness and are condemned merely to keep moving—right, left, for-
ward or backward—as if eternally treading the rectilinear paths of the urban
grid.
Die Jakobsleiter’s hexachordal motive thus cannot be considered exclusively
a vehicle of spiritual revelation. This is not to say that it plays no part in the or-
atorio’s striving for the beyond: at the end of part I, the Soul is released from
the body of the One Who Is Dying to the tune of the hexachord, whose
pitches are now presented in the order F–A –E–D–C –G (Ex. 7). Just before
the close of the passage, however, a chorus of speaking voices intones the
words “Movement! Earthly sorrow! He must still wander for long!” (Ex. 8).
Five pitches from the source hexachord serve as the first five notes of the
(pitched) Sprechstimme melody. “Bewegung” is set as C –F–E, and “Erden-
jammer” as A –G–E–B (the final note lies outside the collection). Even at the
moment of the Soul’s transcendence, a clear link remains between the hexa-
chord and the theme of earthly wandering.
On one level, the oratorio’s images of movement and travel operate as
straightforward metaphors for spiritual questing. But the metaphysical mes-
sage need not trump the libretto’s references to literal motion through space.
If the biblical Jacob’s ladder was a magical conduit joining earth and heaven,
then perhaps the theme of movement in Die Jakobsleiter should be considered
a means of bringing worldly and divine spaces into relation. Going further, I
would suggest that the oratorio’s focus on motion illuminates the broadly
“spiritual” (in the sense of geistlich) significance of changes in the nature of
urban space in the early twentieth century. Indeed, Die Jakobsleiter’s image
of urban movement is quite different from earlier, more positive evocations of
the city walker, particularly Baudelaire’s admiring description of the flâneur in
his essay “The Painter of Modern Life” (1859–60). Praising the idle yet
supremely engaged urban stroller, Baudelaire mused, “His passion and his
profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur,
for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart
of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the
fugitive and the infinite.”98 Baudelaire’s famous definition of modernity in
the same essay named the “fugitive” (along with the “ephemeral” and “con-
tingent”) as one of its principal characteristics, and the ever-mobile flâneur
was uniquely qualified to perceive and record it.99
98. Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in The Painter of Modern Life and
Other Essays, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1964), 9.
99. Ibid., 13.
174
principal hexachord
565 â = ca. 70 ¦ð
Die ¦ð ²ð
Seele Š ./ ½ [ ¦ð −ð ¦ð ] ²ð
¦ð
\\ ¦Ł ý ²Ł
Gabriel
Ý/ ½ ½ ¦ð Ł ¦Ł ¦Ł ²Ł ¦Ð ¼
. ¦Ł
du wie - der dem Licht? Die
\\\\ Nahst
$ −Ł ¦ð −ð ý ¦ð −Ł ¦ðý ¦ð ¦Ł
Š ./ ½ ¼
Er - at - me dir
\\\\
* Hohe ¦Ł −ð ¦ð ¦Ł ²ð ý
Frauen- Š ./ ½ ¼ ¦ ðý ²ð ¦Ł
stimmen
Er - at - me dir
\\\\
/ ½ ¼ −Ł ¦ð −ð ý ¦ð −Ł ² ðý ¦ð −Ł
%Š .
Er - at - me dir
\\
Frauen ÿ ½ ½ ¦ ½ ¹
$ /
S Š. ¼ ¹ − ¦ − ¦ ¦ ¦ −
Journal of the American Musicological Society
Ein Re - gen - bo - gen auf ih - rem

Männer Ý/ ÿ ÿ ÿ
B % .
8 va
â = ca. 70 ¦Ł ¦Ł −Ł 6
¼ −Ł ½ ¦Ł 6
¦Ł ¦ Ł ¦ Ł ² Ł −Ł ¦ Ł ²Ł −Ł ¦Ł −Ł −Ł ²Ł
−ð ý ¦Ł
−Ł ¹ ² Ł ¦ Ł ¦ Ł Ł ¹ ¦ Ł − Ł ¹ ¦Ł ¦ Ł ¦ Ł ¦ Ł ¹ ¦ Ł ¦ Ł −Ł ¦ Ł ¹
Š ./ ¹ −Ł −Ł ¹ ¹ ¦ Ł −Ł ¦ Ł ² Ł ¹ ¦Ł ¦ Ł ²Ł ¦ Ł
6 6
6
6
6
−Ł ¦Ł
6 6
! \\ ¦ ð Ł −¦ ŁŁ −− ŁŁ ¦ ¦¦ ŁŁŁ ýýý ¦ Ł ²¦ ŁŁ −¦ ðð ² ð
Ý/ ½ ½ ¦Ł ¦ ² ŁŁ ¦ ðð ²Ł
.
²¦ ðð ŁŁ ¦Ł ¦Ł ¦ð ¼ ²¦ Ł

* Diese hohen Frauenstimmen müssen immerhin so Zahlreich besetzt sein, dass das Aussetzen und Wiedereintreten der atembedürftigen Stimmen unmerklich geschehen kann.
(Von hier an werden die gehaltenen Noten der Seele stets von Glockenspiel, die hohen Frauenstimmen von drei Klarinetten begleitet.)
accel.
585 3
¦ð −ð ¦ð Łpesante ¦ Ł 3
Die ¦ Ł ²Ł
Seele Š ¦ð ¦Ł ¦Ł −Ł ¦ Ł ² Ł ¦Ł
3
Gabriel
Ý ¼ ¦Ł ¦ ðý ²Ł −Ł ²Ł ¦Ł −Ł
−Ł ¼ ¦Ł
Nun klagst du nicht mehr; be - ginnst zu be -
\\ \\\
¦\Ð ý \\ \ð
Hohe $ −ðý
Frauen- Š ¦ Łm
stimmen
Til - ge die
\ \\ \ \\ \\\
Hohe ¦Ð ý ð
Frauen- Š −ð ý
stimmen ¦ Łm
Til - ge die
\ \\ \ \\ \\\
− Ðý −ð −ð ý
%Š ¦ Łm
Til - ge die
Frauen
$ ÿ ÿ
S Š
Männer Ý ÿ ÿ
B %
pesante accel.
¼ −Ł ¦Ł
Š ¦ ¦−ððð −−−ŁŁŁ ¦ ¦ ŁŁ −−ŁŁ ²Ł ¦Ł ¦¦ ŁŁ ¦Ł ¦Ł
¦¦ ŁŁ ²Ł ¦¦ ŁŁ
\\ 3
3
!
Schoenberg’s Interior Designs
Ý ¼ ¦Ł ¦ð ý ¦Ł ¦Ł ²² ŁŁ −Ł ²Ł ¦Ł −Ł
½ −Ł ¼ ¦Ł
¼
175
Example 8 continued
176
587 − Ðý t −ð
Die ¦ð
Seele Š −ð ¦ð
¦ð ¦ð
3
Ý ¦ð Ł ¦Ł ¦Ł ¦Ł ¦Ł Ł −Ł ¦Ł ¦Ł
Gabriel ²Ł −Ł −ð ½ ½
-grei - fen, was du bald wie - der ver - ges - sen musst.
\\
Hohe $ ¦ð ¦Ð
Frauen- Š −ð −ð −ð ¦ð −ð ½
stimmen
Sin - ne . . .
\\
Hohe
Frauen-
¦ð ¦Ð ²ð ¦ð ¦ð ½
stimmen
Š ¦ð ¦ð
Sin - ne . . .
\\
¦ð ²Ð ½
%Š ¦ð ¦ð ¦ð ²ð ¦ð
Sin - ne . . .
$ ¦
Journal of the American Musicological Society
Frauen ½ ÿ ÿ
S Š ¹ ² ¦ ¼
Be - we - gung!
Männer Ý ÿ ½ − ¦ ¦ ÿ
B % − ½
6
6 6 ¹ ¼ Er - den - jam - mer!
²Ł ¦ Ł ² Ł ¦Ł
¦Ł ¦Ł ¦Ł ¦ð −Ł ¦Ł
− ¦ ¹ŁŁ ¦ −− ŁŁ ¦ Ł ¦ Ł ² Ł
Ł ¦ Ł ¦ Ł ¦ Ł ¦Ł
−Ł −¦ ŁŁ ¦ Ł ²Ł ¹ ¦ Ł −Ł ² Ł Ł ¦ ¦¦ ŁŁŁ ŁŁŁ −−ŁŁ ¦ ¦¦ ŁŁŁ −−ŁŁ ½
−Ł −Ł
Š ¦ Ł ²Ł − Ł ¦Ł ¦ Ł
6
! \ \ \ 3
\\
Ý ¦ð ¦Ł ² Ł ¦ Ł ¦²Ł
¦− Ł ¦¦ ŁŁ ŁŁ ¦ Ł −− ŁŁ ¦ ¦ ŁŁ ¦ Ł −¦ ðð ½ ½
²¦ ŁŁ ² Ł ¦ Ł −−ŁŁ ¦ Ł ¦ Ł ¦ ¦ ŁŁ ²ð Š
The narrator of Jacob Wrestles, by contrast, is an unhappy inversion of the

flâneur. Preoccupied with his own emotional states, his observational talents
are directed not toward his fellow Parisians but at the various churches and
artworks he passes on his walks—the “eternal” counterparts to modern
ephemerality in Baudelaire’s scheme.100 He spends most of his time in misan-
thropic isolation and self-torment, emerging only every now and then from
the “life of the eremite” to take a meal with an acquaintance or pass an
evening feeling “happy in the crowd.”101 Descriptions of the city’s less savory
surroundings typically veer toward loathing. After an encounter in the
Luxembourg Garden (his favorite spot in the city) with a cloaked figure called
the Unknown, the narrator is magically thrust out into the street once more
to find himself “breathing a stifling atmosphere of carbonic oxide, and stand-
ing alone on the gloomy, dirty, autumnal-looking Rue Medici.” Setting the
paradisiacal qualities of the garden into relief, he continues, “But as soon as
the crowd again presses round me in the glaring light of the gas lamps, and all
the exposed wares in the shops remind me of the trivialities of life, the scene
in the garden appears like a miracle, and I hasten in alarm to my lodging,
where meditation plunges me into an abyss of doubt and anxiety.”102
With its alternately desolate and claustrophobic spaces and its poisonous at-
mosphere, the city irritates Strindberg’s protagonist more than it entertains
him. (Perhaps it irritates Schoenberg’s Gabriel, too: turning away from the
crowd at last, he remarks, “Ah! The air is pure again.”) While the narrator’s
troubled personality is largely to blame, his experiences also reflect sociological
and environmental changes that had taken place in the interval between
Baudelaire’s original conception of flânerie and Strindberg’s unsettled resi-
dence in Paris. Mary Gluck has written that Baudelaire’s flâneur, at home in
pre-1848 Paris, was evicted from his former routes and haunts following
Haussmann’s reorganization of the city around wide, orderly boulevards.103 A
similar change in the management of urban space took place in Vienna with
the construction of the Ringstrasse (and associated buildings) in the 1860s, a
project favoring vehicles rather than pedestrians and geared to the ostentatious
display of civic pride. Its design stressed open space, the grandeur of individual
buildings, and, as Carl Schorske has written, the “primacy of the street” as an
“artery of men in motion.” The consequences of such planning were, in
Schorske’s words, a “sense of isolation and unrelatedness created by the spatial
placement of the buildings,” an isolation that reinforced “urban loneliness and
the fear of the vast and bustling void.”104 The monadic impression of the
Ringstrasse’s buildings was amplified by the way each formed a snapshot of an
100. Ibid.
101. Strindberg, “Wrestling Jacob,” in Legends, 151, 213.
102. Ibid., 179–80.
103. See Mary Gluck, “Reimagining the Flâneur: The Hero of the Novel in Lukács,
Bakhtin, and Girard,” Modernism/Modernity 13 (2006): 747–64.
104. Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna, 36, 64.
earlier style, a feature Loos lamented in the essay “Potemkin City.” Others
criticized the project on less aesthetic grounds. The architect and Wagner
enthusiast Camillo Sitte was repelled by the Ringstrasse’s “cold sea of traffic-
dominated space” and sought ways to reinstate pockets of community amid
the inhospitable, “anonymous” expanse of concrete and pavement.105
Echoing Sitte’s view of the human consequences of overly rationalized urban
planning, Walter Benjamin wrote in 1929 that cultural monuments (as repre-
sentatives of the “eternal”) and “streets that are too well-paved” were anath-
ema to the flâneur, whose found his true home among the city’s less enduring
but socially richer spaces.106
In its reliance on images of disorientation and irresolute motion, Schoen-
berg’s depiction of spiritual waywardness in Die Jakobsleiter pointed to con-
temporary concerns over the alienated and soulless movement generated by
modern urban planning. In public spaces such as the Ringstrasse, principles
of efficiency and economic gain took precedence over the flâneur’s dreamlike
chronicling or Sitte’s idealistic view of the pedestrian’s communal routes.
“Whether right, left, forward or backward, uphill or downhill, one has to go
on without asking what lies before or behind”: Gabriel’s opening line captures
the experience of motion for the sake of motion, motion in which individuals
are estranged from each other and from communal spiritual ideals. With this
context in mind, let us consider once again Webern’s claim that Die Jakobs-
leiter forecasts the musical space Schoenberg described in the 1941 “Compo-
sition with Twelve Tones.” In that text, the absence of any distinction
between up and down, right or left, forward or backward is presented as a re-
alization of the divine omnidirectionality limned in Seraphita’s description of
heaven. The peripatetic multitudes of Die Jakobsleiter, on the other hand,
seem merely confused, unsure of the right path to spiritual enlightenment.
The multiple poetic situations in which the principal hexachord is deployed
—at times it suggests constraint or a lack of clear direction, but it also accom-
panies the final release of the Soul—further complicate the view that Schoen-
berg’s embryonic serial techniques realized Swedenborgian transcendence. To
be sure, “working with tones of the motive” (as the composer described it)
and the completion of the chromatic in Die Jakobsleiter are closely related to
Schoenberg’s subsequent methodology. But despite the composer’s assertion
that he sought to “build all the main themes of the oratorio from a row of six
tones,” the hexachord is by no means so omnipresent.107 On the contrary, the
oratorio’s musical material is only partially organized by a network of related
themes, and the order of the hexachord’s pitches is far more flexible than that
of a twelve-tone row (even if Schoenberg did not always treat row order as
105. Ibid., 64.

106. Walter Benjamin, “The Return of the Flâneur,” in vol. 2 of Selected Writings, ed.
Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al.
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 263.
107. Schoenberg, “Composition with Twelve Tones (2),” 247.
strictly as the “method” implies).108 To project the kind of musical space out-
lined in “Composition with Twelve Tones,” there must be a stable shape to
present up, down, forward or backward. That shape is precisely what is miss-
ing in Die Jakobsleiter, whose hexachordal motive is less a motive than an
abstract fund of pitches to be ordered and reordered at will.109 The words of
the oratorio’s most complacent group of urbanites, the “Indifferent,” might
be taken as an apt description of Schoenberg’s motivic technique: “Ever
onward: why not? Sometimes we’re up, then down again; now we should
perhaps go to the right, later rather more to the left. . . .”
In sum, the sheer diversity of Schoenberg’s compositional arsenal in Die
Jakobsleiter (notably its multiple techniques of variation) belies any stable con-
ception of an all-encompassing musical space.110 While the oratorio clearly
evinces Schoenberg’s interest in the spiritual implications of different kinds of
motion, his treatment of musical movement and thematic variation had to un-
dergo substantial revision before the equivalence of all directions could be-
come a symbol of heavenly transcendence rather than earthly indecision.111
Ironically, it may have been a worldly experience that gave Schoenberg the
tools to formulate the spiritual ideal of musical space set forth in “Composi-
tion with Twelve Tones”—the experience of interiority in the houses of Adolf
Loos.
“Free Thinking in Space”
At the base of everything is the single man. He is often forgotten today. It is

he who must be integrated—integrated in his inner nature, without being
brutalized . . . All talk about organizing and planning is vain when it is not
108. “When I built the main themes from these six tones I did not bind myself to the order
of their first appearance. I was still at this time far away from the methodical application of a set.”
Schoenberg, “Composition with Twelve Tones (2),” 248. (The notion of “working with tones”
also appears here.)
109. On this last property, see Simms, Atonal Music, 174; and Ethan Haimo, Schoenberg’s
Serial Odyssey: The Evolution of His Twelve-Tone Method (New York: Oxford University Press,
1990), 62.
110. On the range of compositional techniques employed in Die Jakobsleiter, see Simms,
Atonal Music, 165–77.
111. In the “Death-Dance of Principles” (“Totentanz der Principien”), a 1915 text intended
for the sixth movement of Schoenberg’s projected choral symphony, the notion of multidirection-
ality makes an appearance as a difficult-to-grasp aspect of totality. The notoriously oblique text
might be described as a meditation on the problem of perceiving the ultimate spiritual reality
when “it” appears in so many different guises: “Now it sings; each sings something different
thinking that it sings the same thing; and, in fact, sounds in one direction [Richtung] together,
(surprised) in another diverse. In a third and fourth it sounds still otherwise, which one cannot ex-
press. It has countless directions and each one is perceivable” (Bailey, Programmatic Elements,
98–99 [translation slightly altered]). Though the passage is suggestive, its deliberately obscure
imagery makes it difficult to draw any precise conclusions about the spatial principles at work.
possible to create again the whole man, unfractured in his methods of thinking
and feeling.112
Die Jakobsleiter, though unfinished, served as a testing ground for techniques

of variation and presentation that were essential to Schoenberg’s later music.
In subsequent compositional efforts, Schoenberg pursued ever more rigorous
means of motivic and textural integration, notably by deploying serialized mo-
tives both harmonically and melodically.113 Yet progress was slow. Absorbed
on the one hand by teaching and performance activities, Schoenberg’s unsta-
ble economic and social circumstances in the late teens and early twenties led
to persistent worries over “making a living, political conditions and secu-
rity.”114 The works of the early 1920s (such as the Piano Pieces, Op. 23; the
Serenade, Op. 24; and the Suite, Op. 25) seem less concerned with immedi-
ately capturing inner feelings than with securing some form of stability in the
creative sphere as a counterweight to the uncertainties of everyday life.
Whereas much of his earlier music translated modern forces of disintegration
and fragmentation into audible form, Schoenberg now attempted to reinte-
grate his emancipated material by saturating the musical texture with motives
(for example, in the first piece of Opus 23) and ultimately with twelve-note
rows. Simms remarks that Schoenberg was “never able to give a convincing
reason why his music had to be twelve-tone.”115 Yet the method’s panthe-
matic approach surely afforded the composer a superior symbol of integration.
By grounding a piece’s multifarious melodic and harmonic material in a single
entity (the row), twelve-tone composition offered a tantalizing musical ana-
logue to the restoration of a subjectivity “integrated in [its] inner nature,” to
borrow Giedion’s image. For whom this restoration was achieved is a question
I will address shortly.
According to the 1941 “Composition with Twelve Tones,” a new concep-
tion of musical space played a formative role in the integration made possible
by the serial method. Likening twelve-tone music to both a “scientific theory”
and the vision of heaven in Seraphita, Schoenberg offered an essentially spatial
explanation for the method’s unusual treatment of thematic material: the ho-
mogeneity of musical space makes possible the presentation of a series of
pitches melodically, harmonically, and in four different orderings. Curiously,
however, Schoenberg’s earliest writings on twelve-tone composition do not
mention musical space, even though he had experimented with “horizontal”
and “vertical” renderings of pitch collections in several of the atonal works.116
112. Siegfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture (1941), 3rd ed. (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1954), 764.
113. For a discussion of serialized motives and steps toward the “integration of musical tex-
ture” in the pre–twelve-tone works, see Simms, Atonal Music, 179–89 (quotation from 182).
114. Schoenberg, letter to Zemlinsky, 1919, quoted in ibid., 183.
115. Simms, Atonal Music, 202.
116. Following Schoenberg’s lead, scholars often cite the song “Nacht” from Pierrot lunaire
as an early example of an integrated approach to musical space (see Simms, Atonal Music,
136–39). Joseph Auner finds evidence of a similar approach in Die glückliche Hand; see his “In
As Regina Busch has demonstrated, pinning down what a given theoretical

concept actually meant for Schoenberg is difficult due to the intermittent na-
ture of the composer’s writings and the very indefiniteness of such concepts in
his thinking.117 Indeed, Schoenberg’s notion of twelve-tone musical space,
like the practice of twelve-tone composition itself, changed over the course of
his career as he revised and refined his music’s supporting principles. Even as
late as 1934 he admitted that he was “not yet far enough along theoretically to
explain it all.”118
No matter how integral it may seem to twelve-tone music, the concept of
multidimensional musical space needs to be understood as having developed
in tandem with Schoenberg’s compositional practice. Obviously, the genesis
of an idea is not necessarily coeval to its first appearance in writing. But the ab-
sence of the phrase “musical space” in Schoenberg’s earlier essays suggests that
a more formalized notion of such space may have occurred to him only later.
While Taruskin makes use of the composer’s reference to Seraphita to offer a
religious account of multidimensionality, religion was not the only recourse
available to artists and thinkers who wished to exalt spiritual values in the face
of modern materialism (to recall Kandinsky’s bête noire).119 As we have seen,
Schoenberg’s friend Adolf Loos was singularly preoccupied with establishing
protected inner spaces for the occupants of his villas, whom he ushered into
oases of personalized design divorced from the busy world outside. In the
1920s and 1930s, Loos’s interiors became more and more spatially adventur-
ous in conception. A careful reading of Schoenberg’s prose reveals the gradual
incursion of an architectural perspective clearly related to Loos’s own treat-
ment of space. Admitting historical change into Schoenberg’s view of musical
space allows this echo of Loos’s architectural practice to become audible,
which in turn encourages us to hear twelve-tone music as a response to prob-
lems of movement, space, and interiority in modern urban life.
Schoenberg’s earliest essay on the method, “Twelve-Tone Composition”
of 1923, identified its most important principle as the equality between
“whatever sounds together” and “all that sounds successively.”120 These two
types of presentation—harmonic and melodic—correspond to the concepts
“vertical” and “horizontal” in the unpublished essay “Komposition mit
zwölf Tönen” and Erwin Stein’s “Neue Formprinzipien” of 1924, one of the
first publications to deal with twelve-tone practice.121 The precise date and
Schoenberg’s Workshop: Aggregates and Referential Collections in Die glückliche Hand,” Music
Theory Spectrum 18 (1996): 77–105.
117. See Regina Busch’s three-part article, “On the Horizontal and Vertical Presentation of
Musical Ideas and On Musical Space,” Tempo, No. 154 (September 1985): 2–10; No. 156
(March 1986): 7–15; and No. 157 (June 1986): 21–26.
118. Spies, “Vortrag/12TK/Princeton,” 120.
119. Taruskin, “Scriabin and the Superhuman,” 354–59.
120. Schoenberg, “Twelve-Tone Composition” (1923), in Style and Idea, 207.
121. Erwin Stein, “Neue Formprinzipien,” in Arnold Schönberg zum fünfzigsten Geburtstag
13. September 1924 (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1924), 286–303. “Komposition mit zwölf
authorship of the former essay is uncertain, but Arved Ashby proposes that it
represents Stein’s fleshing out of ideas Schoenberg communicated verbally to
Alban Berg (and perhaps other students) in 1923, when he first made his new
compositional approach public.122 At any rate, “Komposition mit zwölf
Tönen” reiterates the principle Schoenberg recorded in 1923 in slightly more
formal language: “The musical idea is expressed in two dimensions: the verti-
cal and the horizontal.”123
These spatial terms, rather than being products of specifically twelve-tone
thinking, feature prominently in the Harmonielehre and were in common use
beyond the confines of Schoenberg’s circle.124 In the fourth chapter of the
Harmonielehre, Schoenberg described the scale as a rearrangement of the
overtone series’ vertical tones into a horizontal group of “separate, successive
tones.”125 The awkwardness of rendering Schoenberg’s terms die Horizontale
and die Vertikale as nouns in English evidently led Roy Carter (the translator
of the 1922 edition) to change them into adjectives modifying the noun
“plane.” Thus, we read that the scale is an “imitation of the tone on the hori-
zontal plane” rather than simply “in the horizontal” (in der Horizontalen).
While some concept of direction is implied by the latter phrase, adding the
word “plane” to Schoenberg’s image lends a misleading concreteness to his
spatial metaphors. Faced with the notion of horizontal and vertical planes, we
are strongly tempted to assemble them into a “space,” however inchoate. At
this point in time, however, the terms horizontal and vertical functioned for
Schoenberg as descriptive metaphors for simultaneity and succession rather
than ingredients of a theory of musical space. Wagner used the same
metaphors in Opera and Drama to buttress his discussion of harmony and
melody, yet it would be strange to expect his figurative usage to signify a well-
developed concept of musical space.
This is not to say that spatial imagery plays no role in the Harmonielehre—
quite the contrary. In the chapter on modulation, for instance, Schoenberg
employed a range of spatial metaphors alongside another favorite theme,
sovereignty. Noting the difficulty of precisely describing dominant and sub-
dominant regions, Schoenberg remarked that they establish relations to the
tonic and to each other “whose graphic representation in two dimensions
would not be possible.” But rather than alluding to a musical space, this
remark refers to the inadequacy of (necessarily two-dimensional) textbook
Tönen” appears in Rudolf Stephan, “Ein frühes Dokument zur Entstehung der Zwölfton-
komposition,” in Festschrift Arno Forchert zum 60. Geburtstag am 29. Dezember 1985, ed.
Gerhard Allroggen and Detlef Altenburg, 296–302 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1986).
122. Arved Ashby, “Schoenberg, Boulez, and Twelve-Tone Composition as ‘Ideal Type,’ ”
this Journal 54 (2001): 593. See also Shaw, “Schoenberg’s Choral Symphony.”
123. Stephan, “Ein frühes Dokument zur Entstehung der Zwölftonkomposition,” 298.
124. Busch, “On the Horizontal and Vertical,” Tempo, No. 154, p. 5.
diagrams: “Such a representation would at least produce a line doubling back

on itself, which would branch off, however, forming traffic arteries
[Verkehrsadern] from every point in all directions.”126 The Harmonielehre
focuses on techniques for joining one chord to another and ultimately for
moving from one harmonic location to another, not on the space in which
such motion takes place. The sheer number of ways to get from one harmonic
locale to the next makes tonal motion more like navigating the complex
routes and interchanges of a metropolis than traversing a geometrically con-
ceived musical space. This metaphorical urban scene even harbors its own
“vagrants,” chords that roam freely between regions, at home nowhere.127
While Schoenberg’s use of the term “dimension” may appear to signal an
embryonic concept of musical space, the few instances of that word in the
Harmonielehre have little to do with such a concept. For example, toward the
end of the text, Schoenberg likened what would now be called musical pa-
rameters to different dimensions: “In a musical sound three characteristics are
recognized: its pitch, color, and volume. Up to now it has been measured in
only one of the three dimensions in which it operates, in the one we call
‘pitch.’ ”128 Elsewhere Schoenberg suggested that instead of projecting over-
tones only upward (that is, in a series of rising frequencies), sounds might re-
ally “have three dimensions, perhaps even more!”129 And finally, when trying
to explain why chords commonly found in tonal music sound out of place in
an atonal idiom replete with chords of six or more tones, Schoenberg pro-
posed that those simpler chords lack “depth,” which in this context means not
a hidden spatial dimension but a network of harmonic, intervallic, or motivic
relationships whose laws for the moment elude explanation.130 In all these
cases, Schoenberg used the idea of multidimensionality to point to areas
where comprehension fails, particularly in its grasp of sound.
It was only much later that that Schoenberg definitively introduced the
concept of musical space, which appears in neither the 1923 essay “Twelve-
Tone Composition” nor the anonymous “Komposition mit zwölf Tönen.”131
126. Ibid., 150.

127. Ibid., chap. 14. On the relationship between harmonic “vagrancy” and the theme of the
wandering Jew, see Julie Brown, “Schoenberg’s Early Wagnerisms: Atonality and the Redemption
of Ahasuerus,” Cambridge Opera Journal 6 (1994): 51–80.
129. Ibid., 321.
130. Ibid., 420. In a typically Romantic gesture, Schoenberg grants depth to sonorities he
feels are governed by an “inexorable but unconscious logic in the harmonic structure,” a logic
that for the moment escapes human comprehension. On the combination of rational and irra-
tional characteristics in the Romantic metaphor of depth, see Holly Watkins, “From the Mine to
the Shrine: The Critical Origins of Musical Depth,” 19th-Century Music 27 (2004): 179–207.
131. In “Komposition mit zwölf Tönen,” the term Raum (space) arises only once in connec-
tion with registral space (see Stephan, “Ein frühes Dokument zur Entstehung der Zwölfton-
komposition,” 300). By comparison, Stein wrote in “Neue Formprinzipien” that “Schoenberg
described one of the most important principles of the polyphonic style as follows: the musical idea
In a discussion broadcast on the radio in Berlin in 1931, Schoenberg referred

to the “law of the unity of musical space established by myself,” according to
which “harmony and melody, vertical and horizontal create one musical unity,
one space, in whose two dimensions the musical substance is deposited.”132
Schoenberg reiterated this two-dimensional view in the predecessor to
“Composition with Twelve Tones,” the 1934 lecture on twelve-tone compo-
sition known as Vortrag/12TK/Princeton. Here, as in the radio conversation,
the “unity of musical space” served as Schoenberg’s new way to describe the
equivalence of melodic and harmonic presentation hypothesized in 1923. In
the 1934 lecture, he wrote that at some unspecified time, he “arrived at the
thesis that the vertical and the horizontal, harmony and melody, the simulta-
neous and the successive created in reality one unified space.”133 In a list of six
“principal assumptions” governing the twelve-tone method, the unity of mu-
sical space is followed by the related requirement of an “absolute conception
of musical space,” that is, directional equivalence, which Schoenberg had illus-
trated since at least 1924 by explaining how an object (such as a hat) stays the
same no matter if it is observed from below or above, from one side or an-
other.134 This latter principle, which establishes the equal validity of prime,
retrograde, inversion, and retrograde inversion forms, represents the positive
recasting of what in Die Jakobsleiter was an insuperable dilemma. The aimless-
ness that debilitated the religious itinerants of Schoenberg’s oratorio is recti-
fied in twelve-tone composition by an equivalence of directions in which the
very lack of a single right way signals the attainment of an absolute standpoint:
“There is in musical space no absolute upward, downward, forward or back-
ward, since each direction will become another from another point in
space.”135 In other words, there is no privileged perspective by which the
“real” substance of the row can be perceived: it reveals its substance in all
directions.
In Schoenberg’s music, the thematic material of a twelve-tone row can be
presented in the two dimensions of harmony and melody as well as in four dif-
ferent “directions.” Yet melodically presenting the row in various forms actu-
ally takes place within a single dimension—the horizontal. Furthermore, the
distinction between row forms tends to become blurred when segments are
presented vertically as harmonies (for example, the first four pitches of the
prime form could generate the same tetrachordal harmony as the last four
is expressed not only in the horizontal, but at the same time in the vertical, not only in succession
—and thus rhythmically divided—but also regardless of this, in space, as sound-complex—that is,
as a chord” (292). The notion of “space” here seems to refer not to an all-encompassing contin-
uum, but to the “static” vertical dimension as opposed to the rhythmicized horizontal.
132. Schoenberg, “Diskussion im Berliner Rundfunk,” in Gesammelte Schriften 1:277–78.
134. Ibid., 80. On Schoenberg’s image of the hat, see Stein, “Neue Formprinzipien,” 291.
135. Spies, “Vortrag/12TK/Princeton,” 82, 84.
pitches of the untransposed retrograde). Judging from the reformulation of

ideas in the 1941 “Composition with Twelve Tones,” it appears that Schoen-
berg tried to resolve the confusion between the two principles of the unity and
the absolute conception of musical space by merging them into one. That is,
he integrated the concept of directions into that of dimensions to produce (by
fiat, as it were) a multidimensional musical space: “THE TWO-OR-MORE-
DIMENSIONAL SPACE IN WHICH MUSICAL IDEAS ARE PRE-
SENTED IS A UNIT” (capitals in original).136 The “more” of this phrase
implies that “up or down, right or left, forward or backward” are best consid-
ered not mere directions but bona fide dimensions. In a further step toward
integration, Schoenberg gave his two (formerly separate) spatial principles
the appearance of logical necessity: “The unity of musical space demands an
absolute and unitary perception” (emphasis in original).137 The proposition
works simply by extension: since the listener is expected to hear a pitch collec-
tion presented melodically as somehow “the same” as a harmonic presentation
of the collection, he or she should likewise be prepared to discern a similar
“sameness” among the various forms of the row. These forms can thus be
considered dimensions of presentation analogous to harmonic and melodic
dimensions, even though they do not correspond to “real” spatial dimensions.
Though this solution did not really succeed in eliminating the ambiguity
between dimensions and directions of presentation, Schoenberg had good
reason to believe that a two-dimensional conception of musical space, based
on traditional notions of melody and harmony, did not go far enough in ac-
counting for the motivically replete texture of a twelve-tone work. Consider
the Präludium of the Suite, Op. 25, whose principal row forms are shown in
Example 9 (note the homage to Bach at the end of P0). The movement opens
with P0 and P6 in the contrapuntal guise of a two-part invention (Ex. 10).138
P0 is stated in its entirety as a single melodic line in the right hand, but the left
hand quickly abandons this approach, presenting pitches 5–8 and 9–12 of P6
as a series of dyads (mm. 2–3). P6 is folded back on itself, so to speak, dou-
bling the “dimension” of presentation originally represented by this row form.
Or perhaps tripling it: the two lines of melody also produce harmonies that
express the intervallic character of the row in a more vertical manner. A two-
dimensional concept of polyphony falls short in capturing the full range of
relationships at play in a twelve-tone work, especially since the harmonies that
result from twelve-tone counterpoint are particular to the piece in a way that
the (tonal) harmonies of, say, an eighteenth-century fugue are not.139

137. Ibid., 223.
138. All of my musical discussions use “movable do” notation in which row forms are desig-
nated by their transpositional distance from a prime form set at level 0.
139. Looking for a way to apply Schoenberg’s “rather obscure” notion of multidimensional
space, Martha Hyde suggests that there are two harmonic dimensions at work in twelve-tone
Example 9 Principal row forms of Schoenberg’s Suite, Op. 25
H C A B
Š Ł Ł −Ł −Ł −Ł ¦Ł Ł Ł Ł −Ł
P0 Ł −Ł
Š −Ł ¦Ł −Ł Ł Ł Ł ¦Ł −Ł −Ł
P6 Ł −Ł ¦Ł
Š Ł −Ł Ł ¦Ł Ł −Ł Ł −Ł Ł −Ł
I0 −Ł Ł
Š −Ł Ł Ł −Ł −Ł ¦Ł −Ł Ł ¦Ł
I6 −Ł Ł ¦Ł
Example 10 Schoenberg, Suite, Op. 25, Präludium, mm. 1–3. © Copyright 1925 by Universal
Edition A.G., Vienna/UE 7627. Used by permission.
Präludium
Arnold Schoenberg Op. 25
Rasch (äý = 80)

l n P0 ^[ \l
¹ ¦ Łl Ł ¦ Ł −Łl −Ł ý −Ł ¹ ¦ Ł Ł p p ¹p p ¹p −Ł
!
Š
Ý
24 [ \
pý − Łpý
Ł

p
−Ł
¦ p
Łý
¦ Łl
\
¦ Ł ¦ Ł −Ł Ł Ł ] p p p
[\
−Ł Ł Ł
¼ [
P6 (1–4)
¹
][
−Ł ý
] ¹ [¦ Ł ¦ Ł ¦ Ł
[l l l l]
\\
¾
¦ Ł ² Ł − Ł ¦ Ł ²Ł ]
P6 (5–8)
Š
P6 (9–12)
I have intentionally employed a rather loose notion of dimension in order

to acknowledge its conceptual allure and highlight its shortcomings. The lack
of a clear spatial analogue to the multiple dimensions of Schoenberg’s musical
space suggests that he found the idea of multidimensionality appealing for
reasons other than its capacity to describe his music literally. Though he cited
Balzac’s Seraphita as inspiration, this source, which he had read decades
earlier, cannot by itself account for the increasing emphasis placed on spatial
music: a “primary” one consisting of the intervallic structure of contiguous row segments and a
“secondary” one made up of noncontiguous pitch collections. In neither case are the “har-
monies” involved necessarily vertical. See Hyde’s “Musical Form and the Development of
Schoenberg’s ‘Twelve-Tone Method,’ ” Journal of Music Theory 29 (1985): 85–143, esp. 113.
formulations in his writings.140 Compare the following two passages from

the 1934 and 1941 essays: after positing that all musical events occur in “one
unified space,” the earlier lecture concludes that “whatever occurs at any point
of this space occurs not only there, but in the entire space of presentation
[Darstellungsraum], so that a certain motion in the melody (e.g., a chromatic
step) affects not only the harmony but everything that follows.”141 Revising
this passage in 1941, Schoenberg wrote, “All that happens at any point of
this musical space has more than a local effect. It functions not only in its
own plane, but also in all other directions and planes, and is not without influ-
ence even at remote points.”142 The language here, with its implied abun-
dance of directions and planes, seems to reach beyond the limitations of
the two dimensions—horizontal melody and vertical harmony—operative in
the earlier passage. Busch notes that the “unusual spatial conceptions”
Schoenberg admired had a real-world counterpart in Loos’s architecture.143 I
would go further and suggest that Loos’s architecture may have been the
stimulus that nudged the composer toward the compelling but enigmatic idea
of “two-or-more-dimensional” musical space.
Specifically, Schoenberg’s effort to craft a theoretical alternative to two-
dimensional space resonated with Loos’s new approach to residential design in
the 1920s and 1930s. Even as his houses assumed more austere and cubical
forms on the outside, Loos began to apportion interior space volumetrically
using a new method known as the Raumplan (space-plan). In a book on Loos
published in 1931, Heinrich Kulka, Schoenberg’s architectural correspondent
in Vienna, introduced this term and described it as “free thinking in space.”144
140. Even if Balzac’s book were the sole nonmusical source influencing the concept of musi-
cal space in “Composition with Twelve Tones,” Schoenberg would have had to supplement con-
siderably the images it presents. The crucial depiction of heaven stresses synesthetic perception
and boundlessness rather than the equivalence of directions per se: “Light gave birth to melody,
melody gave birth to light; colors were light and melody; motion was a Number endowed with
Utterance; all things were at once sonorous, diaphanous, and mobile; so that each interpenetrated
the other, the whole vast area was unobstructed and the Angels could survey it from the depths of
the Infinite. . . . The scene was to [Wilfred and Minna] a prospect without horizon, a boundless
space into which an all-consuming desire prompted them to plunge.” Honoré de Balzac,
Seraphita, in vol. 39 of La comédie humaine, trans. Katharine Prescott Wormeley (Chicago:
Holdoway, 1896), 192–93.
143. Busch, “On the Horizontal and Vertical,” Tempo, No. 154, p. 10. For Joan Allen
Smith, the analogy between twelve-tone composition and Raumplan-based design is simply one
of degree: the structural reorganization necessitated by Loos’s approach was on the order of that
required of Schoenberg in developing the twelve-tone method. See her Schoenberg and His Circle,
46.
144. The phrase appears in the following: “Through Adolf Loos there came into the world
an essentially new and higher idea of space: a free thinking in space . . .” (“Durch Adolf Loos kam
ein wesentlich neuer, höherer Raumgedanke zur Welt: Das freie Denken im Raum . . .”).
Heinrich Kulka, Adolf Loos: Das Werk des Architekten (Vienna: Schroll, 1931), 14.
Schoenberg himself ordered Kulka’s book from the publisher in 1938, three
years before settling on the multidimensional terminology of the later “Com-
position with Twelve Tones.”145 The most characteristic feature of the Raum-
plan was that, in contrast to the conventional division of a house into discrete
floors, individual rooms could have different heights according to their uses.
Though earlier projects tentatively explored this method, Raumplan-based
design matured with the Rufer House (Vienna, 1922) and reached virtuosic
heights in the Moller House (Vienna, 1928) and Villa Müller (Prague,
1930).146 In the Villa Müller, the hallway and the dining room are both ele-
vated, to different degrees, above the living room (Fig. 5), which as the focal
point of social activity has the highest ceiling (the opulent marble covering
on the partitioning wall is what Schoenberg longed to have in a house of his
own). Both the Villa Müller and the Moller House feature low-ceilinged sit-
ting areas intended for reading or intimate gatherings. Staircases, such as the
one in the entryway of the Moller House, rise and fall to unpredictable eleva-
tions, creating an almost vertiginous effect (Fig. 6). As Loos reported to a
Czech journalist in 1930, “My work does not really have a ground floor, first
floor or basement. It only has connected rooms, annexes, terraces. . . . The
rooms must then be connected in such a way as to make the transition
imperceptible. . . .”147 Dika Newlin’s description of the houses, based on
Schoenberg’s own knowledge of them, reproduces this idea almost exactly:
“They are so constructed that, with the use of only a few occasional steps, one
can proceed from the first floor to the second without being conscious of the
change.”148
Loos’s distribution of motion upon floors situated at different levels and
among rooms of variable volumes (owing to their different ceiling heights) ac-
centuated the three-dimensionality of living spaces and offered a persuasive ex-
ample of how a traditional treatment of space might be overcome in favor of
greater freedom of movement. Whereas modern urban planning tended to
subordinate the movement of subjects across the cityscape to the economically
motivated ideal of efficiency, Loos compensated for this restriction with the
eccentric variety of motion possible within the privacy of the home. Writing
for the Prager Tageblatt in 1930, the architect Willy Hofmann captured this
aspect of Loos’s work in an article about the Villa Müller:
145. See Nono-Schoenberg, Arnold Schönberg, 349, for a reproduction of the letter, which
also includes requests for Loos’s Spoken into the Void and the Festschrift celebrating the architect’s
sixtieth birthday: Adolf Loos zum 60. Geburtstag am 10. Dezember 1930 (Vienna: Lanyi, 1930).
146. Panayotis Tournikiotis lists the owners of the first house as “Joseph and Maria Rufer,”
but I have not been able to verify whether this was indeed Schoenberg’s student Josef Rufer. See
Tournikiotis, Adolf Loos, trans. Marguerite McGoldrick (New York: Princeton Architectural Press,
2002), 81.
147. Quoted in Cynthia Jara, “Adolf Loos’s Raumplan Theory,” Journal of Architectural
Education 48 (1995): 186.
148. Dika Newlin, Schoenberg Remembered: Diaries and Recollections, 1938–76 (New York:
Pendragon Press, 1980), 133.
Figure 5 Adolf Loos, Villa Müller (Prague, 1930), view from the living room into the dining
room (above left) and stairwell (above middle). Albertina Museum, Vienna (Loos-Archiv, ALA
2487). Used by permission.
Nothing on the exterior of this latest villa by Adolf Loos betrays the really new
principle of creation which it embodies, completely deviating from all the usual
conceptions of available living space and the way it should be divided up. The
accustomed pattern of the private house—living rooms downstairs, bedrooms
upstairs, both connected by a staircase, i.e. two independent units on two dif-
ferent levels—is changed in favor of a convincing and surprisingly harmonious
sequence of different sized rooms of various heights which lead in a gradual as-
cent from the entrance to the first floor and hence fuse the whole house into a
single strange unity.
...
The many different levels make it necessary for anyone who wants to get from
the dining room to the study, for example, to go down two steps to a landing,
climb another eight from there, and descend a further four steps again in the
room itself. This may appear absurd, but it has been done with such a fine feel-
ing for spatial effect, with such a supreme mastery in the exploitation of per-
spective views, that what might otherwise have easily seemed ridiculous,
compels reflection from sheer force of personality.149
149. Quoted in Ludwig Münz and Gustav Künstler, Adolf Loos: Pioneer of Modern
Architecture, trans. Harold Meek (New York: Praeger, 1966), 151, 153–54.
Figure 6 Moller house, view of the entryway (below left) and stairwell. Albertina Museum,
Vienna (Loos-Archiv, ALA 256). Used by permission.
Marveling at the disjunction between exterior plainness and interior intricacy

in Loos’s residential designs, Hofmann found the idiosyncratic distribution of
interior space and the odd feeling of unity it produced irresistible. Schoenberg
too was impressed by the Villa Müller. In a 1930 letter to Loos reporting his
visit to the house, he exclaimed, “Magnificent!! I have never seen anything
more beautiful in the architecture of any era! No prince could live better!”
From Barcelona the following year, he added, “I think often and much about
you, not least because I always wish to live in a Loos house: if only I had
money; construction is so expensive here!!”150
An even more compelling testament to the effect of Loos’s work on
Schoenberg’s imagination is the latter’s contribution to the 1930 Festschrift
honoring the architect’s sixtieth birthday, a document more forthcoming
about the composer’s views on space than anything dating before the 1941
“Composition with Twelve Tones.” The essay begins with the confession that
although most works of sculpture strike the composer as a series of reliefs
lacking integration, those by Michelangelo show that the master was able to
“see [his] object from all sides simultaneously.” By analogy, Schoenberg com-
plained that most architecture is conceived two-dimensionally, like painting, so
that “the three dimensions are not experienced simultaneously, but one after
another.” He reacted differently to buildings by Loos: “Here I see, as in the
work of the great sculptor, a fully merged, immediate, three-dimensional con-
ception.”151 Although these reflections show that Schoenberg was interested
in a multidimensional concept of space before he set down a musical version of
the idea in prose, it is striking how much better formulated this concept is in
the Festschrift essay than in the lecture from 1934. This discrepancy suggests
that Schoenberg fully worked out the idea of “two-or-more dimensional”
musical space only sometime after 1934. If this is so, then he did not originally
base twelve-tone music on a theory of musical space involving more than two
dimensions. Instead, he only gradually came to understand his achievement in
these terms following his engagement with the style of architecture Loos de-
veloped in the 1920s and 1930s.
It is not hard to imagine the appeal that Loos’s fluid treatment of dimen-
sions must have had for Schoenberg, whose brand of musical motion by then
consisted of fitting together the multiple orientations, segmentations, and par-
titions of the row “in such a way as to make the transition[s] imperceptible,” a
practice that produced a “single, strange unity” (Hofmann’s words) like that
produced by the interlocking rooms of a Loos house. Furthermore, Schoen-
berg may have recognized that Loos’s intricate, fully three-dimensional interi-
ors were a form of respite from the prescribed circuits of urban travel. In his
150. Schoenberg, letter to Loos, 1930, in Franz Glück, “Briefe von Arnold Schönberg an
Adolf Loos,” Österreichische Musikzeitschrift 16 (1961): 19, 20.
151. Adolf Loos zum 60. Geburtstag, 59–60. In Schoenberg Remembered, Newlin recorded
that Schoenberg admired Loos’s villas because they were “conceived of in three dimensions from
the beginning” (239–40).
attempt to incorporate the multiple “directions” of row presentation—whose

equal status alleviated the orientational confusion of Die Jakobsleiter—into an
all-embracing “two-or-more-dimensional” musical space, we might see
Schoenberg showing his sympathy for the sociological as well as the technical
aspects of Loos’s designs. This hypothesis is especially suggestive when it
comes to the element of concealment in Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music. The
equivalence of forms of presentation, the multiplicity of guises in which a sin-
gle thematic entity is heard, creates so much variety that unity—the omnipres-
ence of the row—remains essentially hidden. The “depth” of serial structure is
less an attribute of twelve-tone musical space per se than a byproduct of the
split between auditory and compositional realities, or, to paraphrase Schoen-
berg, between what a piece is and how it was made.152
As we have seen, concealment was integral to Loos’s views on modern sub-
jectivity and his approach to residential design. Uninterested in visual effects
for their own sake, Loos set about enriching interior space in order to enhance
his clients’ sense of privacy and interiority. Gravagnuolo aptly describes this
feature of Loos’s designs: “Inside, the house is protective. It is a shell which
shelters in intimacy the psyche of the person who lives there. Here even the
search for lost values may find a warm reception.”153 For Loos, individual ex-
pression was a private matter that belonged indoors, not something to be dis-
played on a building’s facade or even in one’s manner of dress. Overcoming
two-dimensionality occurred in the transition from the outside in, as the
house’s residents shed their reserved (or “flat”) public personae and entered
the architectural equivalent of a private, inner world. In this respect, Loos’s
buildings harbored a kernel of resistance to the specular aims of modernism
and the hegemonic cooptation of subjective interiority. In spite of the shock-
ingly “modernist” appearance of Loos’s houses, their impermeability was de-
cidedly out of step with the contemporary enthusiasm for glass in the Weimar
Republic and elsewhere. In his discussion of latter-day flânerie, Walter
Benjamin remarked that “the cult of ‘dwelling’ in the old sense, with the idea
of security at its core, has now received its death knell. . . . The coming archi-
152. See Schoenberg’s letter to Rudolf Kolisch, 1932, in Arnold Schoenberg Letters, 164.
One might argue that “Composition with Twelve Tones” describes a musical space without
depth: no single dimension in Schoenberg’s account corresponds in any meaningful way to a true
“third dimension.” In this respect, Schoenberg’s concept of musical space was very different from
Heinrich Schenker’s. The fundamental principle of twelve-tone space is equality: no one dimen-
sion (or direction) is more authoritative than any other. For Schenker, however, the “deeper” the
background of a piece, the more coherent and masterful its temporal unfolding. Any piece can
combine horizontal and vertical dimensions into a homophonic or polyphonic texture, but in
Schenker’s view only a privileged set of masterworks possesses the depth of background repre-
sented by the Ursatz. Schoenberg’s musical space, on the other hand, features no comparable in-
ternal hierarchy.
153. Gravagnuolo, Adolf Loos, 22.
tecture is dominated by the idea of transparency. . . .”154 In Pierre Missac’s

words, transparency threatened something that “people had not completely
stopped worshipping: the interior, interiority, expression.”155 As an exterior
cladding, glass facilitated a free circulation of the gaze, a practice that the
French architect Le Corbusier, one of the high priests of modernist architec-
ture, believed invested the eye with a new degree of power. “The horizontal
gaze leads far away,” Le Corbusier wrote: “From our offices we will get the
feeling of being look-outs dominating a world in order.”156 Well aware of the
difference between his views and those of his Austrian colleague, Le Corbusier
reported that “Loos told me one day: ‘A cultivated man does not look out of
the window.’ ” Loos’s attitude, the French architect surmised, found its expla-
nation “in the congested, disordered city where disorder appears in distressing
images. . . .”157 The revitalized urban scene Le Corbusier envisioned would be
thoroughly tamed by rational planning, so that a glance out the window
would be met with order rather than chaos. As Gravagnuolo observes, Loos’s
architecture rejected this “ideology of transparency”: “Even when ‘glass ar-
chitecture’ triumphs in the twenties, Loosian houses will continue to stand
opposite along the streets, with more and more solid walls, genuine protective
screens separating the private from the public.”158
Schoenberg’s own concerns about privacy may have made him doubly
sympathetic to Loos’s designs. Winfrid Zillig noted that the composer was
“always exceedingly reticent about his own creative activity,” an attitude evi-
dent as early as 1905, when he decided to withhold the “private program” of
the First String Quartet.159 In keeping with the urgency of his search for a new
mode of expression, Schoenberg was more communicative during the atonal
years, when he eagerly tried to explain his radical compositional aims to
Busoni. But such openness waned along with the “intuitive aesthetic” of free
atonality. The title of the organization Schoenberg founded in 1918, the
Society for Private Musical Performances, attests to a withdrawal from
the public sphere motivated by ethical concerns very similar to those of Loos.
The society’s prospectus, drafted by Alban Berg, identified one of the group’s
principal aims as the removal of musical performance from the “corrupting
influence of publicity.” The concerts, which were “in all respects private,”
welcomed no guests, nor was any member allowed to publish reviews or
154. Benjamin, “Return of the Flâneur,” 264.

155. Pierre Missac, Walter Benjamin’s Passages, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1995), 158.
156. Quoted in Beatriz Colomina, “The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism,” in Sexuality and
Space, ed. Colomina (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), 112.
157. Ibid., 107.
158. Gravagnuolo, Adolf Loos, 22.
159. See Winfried Zillig, “Notes on Arnold Schoenberg’s Unfinished Oratorio Die
Jakobsleiter,” The Score 25 (June 1959): 7. See also Joseph Auner, “On the First String Quartet,
Op. 7, 1905,” in A Schoenberg Reader, 47–49.
reports.160 Schoenberg’s desire for privacy was even more pronounced during
the initial phases of twelve-tone composition—a time in which he was indeed
searching for the “lost values” of formal clarity and integrity. After keeping his
new techniques to himself for almost two years, he finally revealed them to
his students because he was “afraid to be taken as an imitator of [Josef ]
Hauer.”161 Recalling these years in 1950, Schoenberg wrote that after di-
vulging his methodology to Stein, he “asked him to keep this a secret and to
consider it as my private method. . . .”162 His reluctance to discuss his work
extended to an impatience with “bothersome inquiries” regarding how he
used rows in particular pieces.163 On occasion, Schoenberg did provide de-
tailed analyses of his compositional techniques in individual works, but he did
so mainly in the context of paid lectures.164 Shrouding his own creative activ-
ity behind a veil of privacy mirrored the strict containment of the personal
within a protected inner space characteristic of Loos’s designs.165
In its rejection of the exhibitionist fervor of the atonal works, the twelve-
tone method involved a deliberate concealment of the compositional act. No
longer subjugating the realm of surface appearance to the expressive dictates
of the unconscious, Schoenberg transferred the initial creative activity (that is,
crafting the row and selecting the forms he would use) to a private, precom-
positional sphere. This concern for privacy is manifested in a more complex
fashion in the relationship between the row and the music—in the way that, as
Adorno phrased it, the rows remain “concealed” behind the “real musical
progression.”166 The row might be stated in a relatively clear manner at the
beginning of a piece (as in the opening right-hand melody of the Präludium
discussed above), but thereafter it is rarely treated according to a “primitive,
160. Joseph Auner, “The Society for Private Musical Performances,” in A Schoenberg Reader,
151–52.
161. Schoenberg, “ ‘Schoenberg’s Tone Rows,’ ” in Style and Idea, 213.
162. Schoenberg, “Protest on Trademark” (1950), in Schoenberg and His World, ed. Frisch,
307. See also Joan Allen Smith’s remark that Schoenberg “considered the [twelve-tone] method a
private affair” (Schoenberg and His Circle, 6).
163. Schoenberg, “ ‘Schoenberg’s Tone Rows,’ ” 213.
164. Schoenberg discussed specific passages of his music in “Composition with Twelve
Tones (1)” as well as the lectures “How One Becomes Lonely” (1937), in Style and Idea, 30–53;
and “Analyse der 4 Orchesterlieder op. 22” (1932), in Gesammelte Schriften 1:286–300.
165. Joseph Auner has suggested that Schoenberg’s extreme self-consciousness about his
identity as an artist and the care he took to preserve his legacy (especially the documents that
would one day make up his Nachlass) mean that he considered his workshop to be a kind of pub-
lic space. I would argue, however, that the public eye in which Schoenberg worked was essentially
an internalized gaze (namely, the gaze of history), which profoundly shaped his self-image.
Further, it seems significant that Schoenberg practiced his image management largely in the (inte-
rior) domestic space of his personal library, where he collected and catalogued the items he wished
to leave for posterity—for a public he hoped would be more open-minded than his own contem-
poraries. See Auner, “Composing on Stage: Schoenberg and the Creative Process as Public
Performance,” 19th-Century Music 29 (2005): 64–93.
166. Adorno, “Arnold Schoenberg,” 167.
constantly perceptible, wholly unconcealed, openly pre-existing scheme”—

words Schoenberg used to criticize approaches (like Hauer’s, in his view) that
relied too heavily on the consistent circulation of the chromatic.167 In the
Präludium, P0 is never again heard in the manner of the first three measures,
where it is presented as an exposed melody, though one whose last note initi-
ates a new phrase based on a rhythmic motive of repeated sixteenths. The next
complete linear statement of P0 (Ex. 11; left hand, mm. 6–9) picks up this
rhythmic motive and passes it to the top voice of the right hand in measure 8,
which hammers out pitches 9–12 of P6. The rhythmic play here arguably takes
precedence over the perception of P0 as a distinct melodic entity. By the end
of the phrase, the lower left-hand voice has moved on without a break to the
final four pitches of I0, which stand out to the ear as a mirror image of the pre-
ceding segment P6 (9–12).
These motivic relationships, what Robert Morgan calls the music’s “fore-
ground connections,” likely constitute the “real musical progression” for most
listeners.168 Measures 1–9 of the Präludium, which amount to only about
fifteen seconds of music, contain nine complete statements of row forms; in
measures 6–9, three row forms are in progress at once (P0, P6, and I0). Given
this density of thematic material, it seems obvious that Schoenberg hoped the
attention of listeners would be drawn to musical processes other than the mere
circulation of row forms. Sometimes even a topical hearing is possible, as in
measure 14 (Ex. 12). In preparation for the return of the opening melody in
measure 16 (albeit in a transposed and altered form), the harmonic rhythm
slows drastically, an effect compounded by the slower tempo and ritardando.
Recalling the “invention” idea of the first two measures, pitches 1–4 of P6
return in the left hand in a registrally expanded form, while Baroque-style fig-
uration takes over in the right. Following the D–F dyad (a segment of RI0)
held over from measure 13, playful thirty-second notes oscillate between P6
(5–8) and P6 (9–12). Suitably enough, the top voice traces out the Bach mo-
tive in transposition and inversion (F–F –E –E). This subtle echo of the musi-
cal past, not an uncommon gesture in Schoenberg’s Suite, leads to a welcome
moment of respite: three falling figures concluding in fermatas (mm. 15–16).
Measure 15 contains another statement of P0, but one whose motivic content
is more uniform than that of its inaugural appearance in measures 1–3. Here
Schoenberg partitions the row in such a way as to generate a succession of ma-
jor sevenths in the right hand. In other words, he disregards the original serial
ordering of the row in order to emphasize the sound of this interval, which in
the unusually relaxed setting of measure 15 represents the antithesis of the
167. Schoenberg, “Hauer’s Theories” (1923), in Style and Idea, 211.

168. See Robert P. Morgan, “Musical Time/Musical Space,” Critical Inquiry 6 (1980):
536. Richard Kurth also advocates a motivic approach to twelve-tone listening in his “Dis-
Regarding Schoenberg’s Twelve-Tone Rows: An Alternative Approach to Listening and Analysis
for Twelve-Tone Music,” Theory and Practice 21 (1996): 79–122.
Example 11 Schoenberg, Suite, Op. 25, Präludium, mm. 6–9. © Copyright 1925 by Universal Edition A.G., Vienna/UE 7627. Used by permission.
^[ (1–6) I0 (1–2)
6 ¦Łý
Ý ¦² ŁŁ ² Ł ¦ Ł ² Ł ¦ ŁŁ ¦ Ł ¦ Ł ¾ ¦ Ł −P6
Łý Ł −Ł −Ł ¹
v v vŠ ¾ ¾
[ ¦Ł ¦ Ł ý −Ł
[ [\ [ ¦ Łý
! p p p [\ [\
Ý −¦ ŁŁ −Ł ý −¦ ŁŁ ¾ ¦ Ł −Ł −Ł ¦Ł Ł Ł Ł
¦Ł ý Ł ¦Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ¦Ł
\ \ [¦ ŁP0 (1–12)
I0 (3–4) P6 (9–12) etwas ruhiger

8
I0 (5–8) dolce
¹ý [ l l
Š ¹ ¹ ¹ −Ł
¦Łý −Ł [ Ł¾ Ł¾
Ł ¦ ŁŁ ý −Ł Ł ŁŁ ŁŁ −Ł
[
−Łl ¦−ŁŁ ŁŁ ] ¾Ł Ł −Ł \
[\ ] ^[
! n \\
^[ P6 (7–8)
n
[ ¦Ł
Ý −Ł − Ł −Ł − Ł ¦ ¦ Ł
Ł − Ł ý ¹ ¦Ł
¦Ł ¦Ł ¦Ł −Ł Ł ¦ ŁŁ
¦ Ł −Ł Ł −Ł Ł −Ł −Ł
l l ] l l l l l l ]
\
I0 (9–12)
[
Example 12 Schoenberg, Suite, Op. 25, Präludium, mm. 14–16. © Copyright 1925 by
Universal Edition A.G., Vienna/UE 7627. Used by permission.
etwas langsamer P6 (9–12)

nl Ł n Ł rit. Ł
Ł Ł l ¦ Ł Ł ¦ Ł Ł Ł −Łnl Ł Ł n Ł −Ł Ł Ł ¦ Łn
n Ł ² Ł
14
Š ¦ Ł Ł ¦ Ł
¦ Łl
!
[
Ý −Ł ý
]
P6 (5–8)
−Ł ý ¦Ł ý
−Ł ý
P6 (1–4)
15 q q q tempo
¦ Ł ¦ Ł 11 ¹ 8 ¦ Ł ¦ Ł 9 ¹
1
ý Ł ý −Łý
Š ¦Ł −−−ŁŁŁ ý ¦ Ł Ł ŁŁ [ −Łý ¦ Ł
ý
! 2
q
− Ł 12 6 −Ł ¦ Ł 10
l
n

Ý −¦ ŁŁ ¹ −−ŁŁq ŁŁŁ ¾ ¹ ¾ ¦ Ł
3 5
¹ ¦ Ł
¦ ¦ ŁŁ ýý ¦ Ł
− Ł
4 P0 7
compressed minor second (its commonly heard inversion). Apprehending

these musical qualities requires no corresponding recognition of specific row
forms.
At the same time, these qualities do not change the fact that there is a
numerical substrate that “explains” to a certain extent each individual note of
the piece. Hovering between disclosure and concealment but strongly tending
toward the latter, the row corresponds to the subjective element that Loos
carefully removed from the public gaze, an element that can be fully compre-
hended only by penetrating a work’s structural “interior” through analysis.
From this perspective, twelve-tone composition recuperates the interiority
jeopardized in Schoenberg’s atonal works, but only for the private enjoyment
of the composer (and the analyst). Poring over Schoenberg’s scores in the pri-
vacy of our studies, we count out row forms in an exercise of silent inwardness.
In order to be “expressive” about Schoenberg’s music—to say anything very
specific about it at all—we are forced to journey into the interior, to trace with
our pens the interlacing paths of twelve-tone musical space. But like passersby
before the mute exterior of a Loos villa, as listeners we may feel estranged
from the music’s structural “depths.” This state of affairs might be taken as
evidence of failure on the part of either the listener (who does not try hard
enough to hear serial structure) or the composer (who makes that structure
too difficult to hear). But the trace of Loosian aesthetics in Schoenberg’s
music offers ample justification for why row structure need not be heard in
twelve-tone music. Rather than faulting the music for its “cognitive opacity,”
that music might be understood to express a Loosian aversion to self-revelation

and a desire to protect the inner realm.169 The signal feature of Loos’s resi-
dences was that, as Hofmann remarked, no one looking at the strangely quies-
cent exterior could predict the arrangement of the interior, whose bewildering
yet oddly satisfying layout was experienced by the occupants alone. And while
the “exterior” of Schoenberg’s music is hardly quiescent, the “interior” is di-
vorced from it in a similar way—not entirely divorced, in the sense of having
no effect on the sound of the music, but difficult enough to perceive that the
impression of a piece gained through listening is apt to be quite different from
that arrived at through analysis of row forms.
Using such analysis as a means of dictating the proper way to hear a twelve-
tone piece embraces a logic of transparency more typical of Le Corbusier than
of Loos. Insisting on the unification of analysis and listening risks producing
the musical equivalent of Le Corbusier’s “look-out,” someone comfortably
situated on the “inside” who is determined to hear order on the other side.
But the sound of Schoenberg’s music is really not comparable to the rational-
ist vistas Le Corbusier hoped would greet future office workers as they gazed
out of their windows, despite the composer’s occasional mention of trans-
parency in connection with his thematic writing and orchestration.170 Most
times, Schoenberg’s twelve-tone works display only slightly better manners
than those of the atonal years—many pieces from the 1920s onward still fea-
ture the sudden disruptions in dynamics, rhythmic character, melodic shape,
and texture common in his earlier music. For most listeners, these aspects take
precedence, while the row that would reveal the total plan of pitches in a
twelve-tone work remains on the threshold of perception, if not wholly be-
yond it.
Yet perhaps there is another way to understand what it means to be “in-
side” a twelve-tone piece, one attuned more to the listener than the composer
or analyst—that is, to someone not privy to the details of a work’s row struc-
ture but immersed in the music as it unfolds in time. Like Hofmann in the
169. The phrase comes from Fred Lerdahl, who offers three reasons for serialism’s opacity: it
is a “permutational” rather than an “elaborational” system; it does not distinguish between “sen-
sory consonance and dissonance”; and it is not grounded in a pitch space in which “spatial
distance correlates with cognitive distance.” See his “Cognitive Constraints on Compositional
Systems,” in Generative Processes in Music: The Psychology of Performance, Improvisation, and
Composition, ed. John A. Sloboda (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 251–54.
170. Schoenberg, “Composition with Twelve Tones (1),” 215, 235. On the concept of
transparency, see also Elmar Budde, “Bach-Aneignung: Zur Bach-Rezeption Schönbergs und
Weberns,” in Bach und die Moderne, ed. Dieter Schnebel (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1995), esp.
85. In his article for the Loos Festschrift, Schoenberg wrote that his friend worked “as if all bodies
were transparent, as if the mind’s eye had before it space as a whole, in all its parts and at once”
(Adolf Loos zum 60. Geburtstag, 60). Here it seems as if a multidimensional conception of space is
available only to the genius-artist looking in on his work from the outside, so to speak. Yet this
view of Loos’s achievement, focused as it is on the architect’s superior imagination, does not really
correspond to the aesthetic core of his work.
Villa Müller, listeners to twelve-tone music are confronted with a perplexing

variety of “perspective views”—motives presented up or down, forward or
backward, simultaneously or successively—without necessarily knowing which
rows are in play at a given moment. According to the architect and historian
Siegfried Giedion, the nature of modern space is revealed in just this kind of
experience. In his influential text Space, Time and Architecture, published
the same year as Schoenberg completed “Composition with Twelve Tones,”
Giedion described modern space in words that could easily be mistaken for an
account of twelve-tone musical space: “The essence of space as it is conceived
today is its many-sidedness, the infinite potentiality for relations within it.
Exhaustive description of an area from one point of reference is, accordingly,
impossible; its character changes with the point from which it is viewed. In
order to grasp the true nature of space the observer must project himself
through it.” Significantly, Giedion illustrated his point with an example drawn
from the modern cityscape: New York City’s Rockefeller Center. From the air,
the arrangement of the Center’s fourteen original buildings appears “all quite
rational,” he says, “but the moment one begins moving in the midst of the
buildings . . . one becomes conscious of new and unaccustomed interrelations
between them” that can be “grasped from no single position nor embraced in
any single view.” The Center’s “many-sidedness” makes it “impossible to bind
[the buildings] rationally together.”171
Using strikingly similar language, Alban Berg claimed that Schoenberg’s
music is “never totally comprehensible” due to its rich interrelationships and
“many-sidedness.”172 Twelve-tone music provides an experience of modern
space very much like what Giedion had in mind, particularly since the tempo-
ral aspect—being “projected through it”—is already built in. Like the pedes-
trian strolling around Rockefeller Center or the visitor wandering the
corridors of a Loos villa, the listener is projected through the musical work, in-
undated by motivic material expressing a multiplicity of perspectives. Unlike
the aerial observer, the pedestrian lacks a standpoint from which the total real-
ity of the Center is graspable: it is in a sense a Center without a center.
Similarly, the twelve-tone listener navigates the centerless “inside” of the work
in motion, immersed in the many-sided presentation of musical ideas whose
unifying principle lies just beyond the purview of perception. Listening to
twelve-tone music is to be placed squarely within modern space, whose loom-
ing capacity to overwhelm the senses sits in uneasy tension with its contribu-
tion, in both Loos’s and Schoenberg’s interior designs, to the recuperation of
subjective interiority.
171. Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 431–32, 752.

172. Alban Berg, “Why Is Schoenberg’s Music So Hard to Understand?” (1924), in
Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music, ed. Elliott Schwartz and Barney Childs (New
York: Da Capo, 1978), 67.
Schoenberg’s music thus gives voice to the unsettling proposition that it is

impossible to perceive—as opposed to comprehend intellectually—the com-
plex structural character of modernity. Or, perhaps, of postmodernity: though
Giedion was a committed organicist and modernist, his concept of space at
ground level resembles a signal feature of postmodernism articulated by the
Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo in The Transparent Society.173 For Vattimo,
transparency corresponds to the Enlightenment ideal of perfect knowledge of
both self and other. Ironically, the attainment of this ideal has been thwarted
by the explosion of information made possible by modern technology. Instead
of contributing to a more perfect knowledge of the world, a knowledge as
transparent as the order Le Corbusier envisioned beyond the office windows
of modern man, the contemporary abundance of information has only shown
that no single perspective—no Giedionesque “aerial view”—can encompass
the multiple truths issuing from the global span of cultures and individuals.
For theorists of postmodernism, the utopian concept of the transcendent per-
spective disappears entirely from the realm of thought. What replaces it is het-
erotopia, a many-sidedness in which a limitless number of cultural perspectives
all offer a different view of truth. As an auditory experience of multiplicity in
which the transcendent perspective recedes from the bounds of perception,
Schoenberg’s music offers an uncanny foretaste of this outcome.
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Abstract
Familiar accounts of fin-de-siècle Vienna tend to view Arnold Schoenberg’s

atonal works and Adolf Loos’s anti-ornamental polemics as expressions of
similar modernist principles. But although the two friends were equally deter-
mined to challenge bourgeois standards of beauty, the calm appearance of
Loos’s buildings, whose denuded facades shielded plush yet refined interiors,
is hard to reconcile with Schoenberg’s radically dissonant and expressive music
circa 1910. This divergence can be understood in terms of contrasting re-
sponses to urban modernity. While Loos’s architecture facilitated a retreat in-
ward, Schoenberg’s release of unconscious impulses into the compositional
process mimicked the psychological breakdown Georg Simmel believed to
threaten city dwellers—a breakdown in which inner and outer realms were no
longer distinguishable. Situating Schoenberg’s music in relation to the prob-
lem of interiority in modern metropolitan life, I argue that the composer’s cre-
ative aesthetics began to converge with those of Loos only later in his career.
By incorporating concealment into the very fabric of twelve-tone music,
Schoenberg took an “inward turn” resembling Loos’s architectural efforts to
protect subjectivity from needless exposure. The increasing emphasis on mul-
tidimensionality in Schoenberg’s discussions of twelve-tone musical space also
betrays the influence of Loos’s innovations in interior space planning in the
1920s and 1930s. Harnessing the psychological and sociological aims of
Loos’s designs as tools of interpretation, I propose that the twelve-tone
method represents a renewed commitment to privacy and interiority in the
face of the externalizing impulses of urban modernity.
Keywords: Arnold Schoenberg, Adolf Loos, musical space, architecture, urban

studies

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Schoenberg’s Interior Designs

simultaneous venture into atonality as parallel examples of the critique of

and interiority, I offer a new perspective on that music as an aesthetic expres-

Urban Dynamics of Exposure and Reserve

ued to simulate luxury by ornamenting cheap materials.16 Attacking the im-

changing images, the sharp discontinuity between things encompassed in a

26. Ibid., 117.

ensured his clients privacy. In fact, traditional Germanic Innerlichkeit appears

inner experience must substitute for the shallow pleasures of decoration:

Schoenberg’s turn to atonality was motivated by a desire to compose solely

Bryan Simms describes Erwartung’s music as mimicking the “rapidly chang-

Example 2 Schoenberg, Erwartung, mm. 15–19. © Copyright 1916 by Universal Edition

viel langsamer (ä = 50)

war frü - her so hell. .

$17 noch langsamer (ä = 48)

(horcht in den Wald, beklommen)

Fr. Š ¹ ¦ Ł ¦ Ł ¦ Łý  ¹ ¦ Ł ² Ł  00

52. Simmel, “Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben,” 116.

music results from an “anti-ornamental impulse” hostile to all forms of illu-

No matter how much this rhetoric echoed Loos’s, however, Schoenberg

when one considers the aesthetic consequences: stripping a building’s facade

Though he too rejects the possibility of prolongation in atonal music, Jack

“Orientations, Criteria, Segments: A General Theory of Segmentation for Music Analysis,”

Urban Motion and Spiritual Crisis

Schoenberg’s effort to salvage the inner sphere began in a time-honored fash-

of unbelief ” afflicting the contemporary soul. Every segment of the popula-

Initially, the corollary to Kandinsky’s inward turn—the solution to “material-

Sehr rasch (â = 112)

93. Shaw, “Rethinking Schoenberg’s Composition,” 98, 100.

Lügen um Gluck . . . ! Lies for the sake of happiness . . . !

The musical representation of Einsamkeit (“loneliness”) in the chorus also

$41 poco accel.

self-annihilation. The textual link between loneliness and formula can be

Ein Re - gen - bo - gen auf ih - rem

The narrator of Jacob Wrestles, by contrast, is an unhappy inversion of the

105. Ibid., 64.

“Free Thinking in Space”

At the base of everything is the single man. He is often forgotten today. It is

Die Jakobsleiter, though unfinished, served as a testing ground for techniques

As Regina Busch has demonstrated, pinning down what a given theoretical

diagrams: “Such a representation would at least produce a line doubling back

126. Ibid., 150.

In a discussion broadcast on the radio in Berlin in 1931, Schoenberg referred

pitches of the untransposed retrograde). Judging from the reformulation of

136. Schoenberg, “Composition with Twelve Tones (1),” 220.

Example 9 Principal row forms of Schoenberg’s Suite, Op. 25

Rasch (äý = 80)

I have intentionally employed a rather loose notion of dimension in order

formulations in his writings.140 Compare the following two passages from

Marveling at the disjunction between exterior plainness and interior intricacy

attempt to incorporate the multiple “directions” of row presentation—whose

tecture is dominated by the idea of transparency. . . .”154 In Pierre Missac’s

154. Benjamin, “Return of the Flâneur,” 264.

constantly perceptible, wholly unconcealed, openly pre-existing scheme”—

167. Schoenberg, “Hauer’s Theories” (1923), in Style and Idea, 211.

I0 (3–4) P6 (9–12) etwas ruhiger

etwas langsamer P6 (9–12)

compressed minor second (its commonly heard inversion). Apprehending

that music might be understood to express a Loosian aversion to self-revelation

Villa Müller, listeners to twelve-tone music are confronted with a perplexing

171. Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 431–32, 752.

Schoenberg’s music thus gives voice to the unsettling proposition that it is

Familiar accounts of fin-de-siècle Vienna tend to view Arnold Schoenberg’s

Fr. Š ¹ ¦ Ł ¦ Ł ¦ Łý ¹ ¦ Ł ² Ł 00