Dika Newlin

A quarter‐century after his death and a half‐century after some of his most controversial music was composed. Arnold Schoenberg still stands in the path of music like the ghost of the king in Hamlet, demanding to be heeded. Not that he is forgotten: Charles Rosen, in his remarkably pithy volume (the latest in the Modern Masters series edited by Frank Kermode) asserts that Schoenberg's 12‐tone and otherwise serialistic works “have, in a strange way, become a normal part of today's music; they are not often heard, but they are the works that have been imitated by hundreds of composers all over the world.” True enough, but that has not been enough to lay the ghost. The fact, which even Mr. Rosen's eloquent advocacy only emphasizes, is that the rigorously atonal works, composed after 1921, have never developed a public outside professional music circles, and even there the attitude is largely respect rather than love.