The essay entitled The Great Mutilator by Robin Holloway includes the following paragraphs.

In keeping with the permanently unquiet spirit of its subject this little piece (earnest of a full treatment that I still hope to write one day) from the earliest phase of my Spectator columns (it was only the third) elicited more vociferous reaction than anything in the so-far fifteen years subsequent, either pro or con. Which certainly didn’t foretell the ‘frigid tranquillity’ to which, like every journalist, I’ve grown accustomed!

...But the invention of the dreaded twelve-note method casts a blight over all that preceded it. And his output subsequent to this ‘historically inevitable’ move still falls between two stools. For the sophisticated modernist (spokesman: Pierre Boulez) Schoenberg failed to realise his invention’s potential, falling instead into fustian academicism. Yet for the average music-lover Schoenberg’s apparent conservatism remains the very type of ‘nasty modern music’. An in-between position is hard to formulate. The problem in brief is the complete discrepancy here between horizontal (linear, melodic) and vertical (harmony, both accompaniment and overall architecture). In tonal music the two were absolutely fused. Schoenberg’s twelve-note music is still composed upon tonal premises, but the notes no longer make sense except in mere rationality of construction, and their actual sound is excruciating, with constant overloading and tension without resolution, and a new coarseness in the instrumentation that had once been so rich and delicate.

Our equipment for measuring lucidity and pleasure in music, equally with incoherence and ugliness, is our ears. The only criterion, when the tonal framework we virtually take for granted is withdrawn, is their individual acuity and sensitivity. Anything new or difficult tweaks our ears and we resent it. But willy-nilly their receptivity expands and alters. Throughout the course of music, what was first perceived as senseless cacophony comes in the end, by hard application or passive seepage, to be a further prospect in the garden of delights.

On the whole this course has been one of increasing complexity, a complexity which evolves from within the intrinsic processes of music itself. Schoenberg’s ‘reluctant revolution’ gets this the wrong way round: grammar before speech, a body with skeleton and organs on the outside. It is the blueprint for a grammar only deceptively related to the actual language of music, however much he protested that it was its inevitable outcome. The scientism and pseudo-rationality that have hobbled the more recent avant-garde (together with the arrogant credulity that theirs is the one true way forward) stem from Schoenberg’s attempt to renew an ‘exhausted’ tonality. What he failed to see was that tonality itself is but one current in the more universal stream of musical possibility.

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