Roger Hecht replied to Russell Berg:

>>Why is Schoenberg an important composer?
>
>Schoenberg wrote several great works, thought I'm sure my list of what I
>consider great will differ and be shorter than that of many others.  In any
>case, were our considerations limited to a judgment of quality of works, I
>doubt Schoenberg would be considered as important as he is.

To me, almost everything Schoenberg wrote is great, although I don't
like all of it.  To answer Russell's question, however:  People consider
Schoenberg's work great for the same reasons they consider Bach's work
great:

1.  It works on them emotionally.

2.  It's astonishingly well-written.  In fact, the more you know about
music, the more amazed you become in the presence of many of Schoenberg's
works.

3.  It's imaginative.  You don't find many cliches in it.  He also raises
the bar on what a listener can expect from a piece.

People will tell you that Schoenberg is great because he created a great
method of composition.  This to me is the least of Schoenberg.  I doubt
that the method - absurdly simple in itself - would have caught on, had not
Schoenberg and Webern written masterpieces using it.  Nevertheless, the
musical landscape looked different after Schoenberg, and not just in the
enlarged toolkit for composers.  He left a way of approaching composition
- tonal, atonal, serial, "free" - that very few composers have ignored,
regardless of whether they adopted his 12-tone method or not.  You will
find Schoenberg's influence in such composers as Britten, Copland, Walton,
Pettersson, Leighton, Searle, Frankel, Sessions, Thomson, Weill,
Stravinsky, Reich, Adams, and on and on.  None of these folks sound like
Schoenberg or each other.  Still, all of them look at the problem of
writing music to some extent through his eyes.

The tonality-atonality aspect of Schoenberg is likewise overemphasized.
Schoenberg wrote tonal pieces thoughout his career and himself never
thought much of the distinction.  Besides, most people - including trained
musicians - can't tell atonal pieces from highly chromatic ones anyway
without looking at a score or being told.  I doubt anyone would recognize
that Kenneth Leighton's Piano Variations are 12-tone or that Roger
Sessions's Symphony No.  2 is not.  There is very little difference in
sound between late Schoenberg and late Hindemith, and Hindemith never wrote
an atonal piece in his life.  To me, the most important things about
Schoenberg are that he allowed linear counterpoint to become much more
independent and that he expanded ideas on how highly chromatic and quickly
modulating music coheres.

Steve Schwartz