Schoenberg

The man of the hour was a pretty smart guy:

For 'education' means today: to know something of everything without understanding anything at all.

Here we can see most distinctly what the prerequisite of comfort is: superficiality. It is thus easy to have a 'philosophy', if one contemplates only what is peasant and gives no heed to the rest.

Curiously enough, people of our time who formulate new laws of morality (or, even more to their liking, overthrow old ones) cannot live without guilt.

All in a preface to a book about music theory...

You can see a good portion of the book here (maybe the whole thing). Some of the later chorales make my spine tingle. I love Bach but Schoenberg is so much cooler. Bach's harmony is amazing, but he didn't have 500 years of harmonic evolution to work with. Nobody rags on Louis Armstrong because he wasn't playing like Wynton Marsalis. Schoenberg was able to dig himself the most beautiful of holes and construct an equally beautiful way of getting out of them, somehow going from a C major triad to a V-I in F# in less that 16 chords... you can't help but smile.