"I strive for:
complete liberation from all symbols of
cohesion and logic.
Thus:
Away with motivic working out.
Away with harmony as cement or bricks of a building.
Harmony is an expression and nothing
else.
Then:
Away with Pathos!
Away with protracted ten-ton scores,
from erected or constructed towers, rocks, and other massive claptrap.
My music must be brief, concise! In two notes: not built, but expressed!!
And the results I wish for: no stylized and sterile protracted emotion. People are not like that: it is impossible for a person to have only one sensation at a time.
One has thousands simultaneously. And
these thousands can no more readily be added together than an
apple and a pear. They go their own ways.
And this variegation, this
multifariousness, this illogicality which our senses demonstrate, the
illogicality presented by their interaction, set forth by some mounting
rush of blood, by some reaction of
the senses or the nerves, this I should like to have in my music.
It should be an expression of feeling,
as our feelings, which bring us into contact with our
subconscious, really are, and no false child of feelings and conscious
logic.
Now I have made my confessions and they
can burn me."
- Arnold Schoenberg, in a letter to
Busoni
