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24
focus Arnold Schönberg
As a totality of apparition, as a contradictory spirit
and generative energy, Schönberg is for me a
man of enormous energy, indeed the battery, the
payload for which recharging becomes imperative.
(As much as I love them, I experience Webern and
Berg as being very dependent on that recharging).
Schönberg remains the primary source. With him,
nothing conforms to the classic model, and when he
speaks of “system,” it sounds as though he is inferring
the opposite. With him, density is nothing fabricated;
it is the instance of what is said, what is composed.
And when he sought other expressions in biographical
phases, found them, lost them and found them
again, as a creative potency he is unalike far wider
in his extent than one who seeks to expand his
accomplishments. Schönberg is a wastrel, an excessively
rich profligate. But to be under his spell does not
mean to freeze – it means to be set into motion and
to remain that way, in-cess-ant-ly.
Wolfgang Rihm on Arnold Schönberg