The Musical Thought and Spiritual Lives of Heinrich Schenker and Arnold Schoenberg

This book examines the origin, content, and development of the musical thought of Heinrich Schenker and Arnold Schoenberg. One of the premises is that their inner musical lives are inseparable from their inner spiritual lives. Curiously, they start out in much the same musical-spiritual place, yet musically they split while spiritually they grow closer. Bringing to light a trove of unpublished material, Arndt argues that Schenker’s and Schoenberg’s conflict reflects the tension inherent in their shared conception of the tone as an ideal sound realized in the spiritual eye of the genius.