Arnold Schoenberg

Arnold Franz Walter Schoenberg (the anglicized form of Schönberg — Schoenberg changed the spelling officially when he left Germany and re-converted to Judaism in 1933), (September 13, 1874 – July 13, 1951) was an Austrian and later American composer. Many of Schoenberg's works are associated with the expressionist movements in early 20th-century German poetry and art, and he was among the first composers to embrace atonal motivic development.

Sourced

• I find above all that the expression, 'atonal music,' is most unfortunate--it is on a par with calling flying 'the art of not falling,' or swimming 'the art of not drowning.'
  • Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea, p.210.

• I am the slave of an internal power more powerful than my education.

• If music is frozen architecture, then the potpourri is frozen coffee-table gossip... Potpourri is the art of adding apples to pears…
  • Arnold Schoenberg: "Glosses on the Theories of Others" (1929), See "Style and Idea", Faber and Faber 1985, p.313-314

• My music is not difficult, my music is played badly.

Unsourced

• I have never seen faces, but because I have looked people in the eye, only their gazes.
• There is still much good music that can be written in C major.
• I am delighted to add another unplayable work to the repertoire.