"Will Schoenberg be a New York Fad?": The 1914 American Premiere of Schoenberg's String Quartet in D Minor

By Walter B. Bailey

Imagine a music so different, so difficult, so hideous that it defied every accepted aesthetic norm.… That is what American music periodicals encouraged their readers to do during the four years preceding World War I when they printed provocative reports from europe concerning the music of Arnold Schoenberg. Without benefit of having heard it, readers could only imagine the music that evoked such strong opinions. As Schoenberg's notoriety grew in Europe, so did the intensity of those opinions and the frequency with which they were reported. As a result, between 1910 and 1914 Schoenberg came to represent for American readers all that was new and challenging in European musical circles but as yet unheard in the united states. If there were an anecdote about modernist music—or any kind of seemingly incomprehensible music—to be relayed, one could expect that "Schoenberg" would be the punchline. In similar fashion, if critics wanted to identify an especially outrageous musical event or composer—Stravinsky, for example—they used Schoenberg as a point of reference. As modernism made its entry into America's musical consciousness, "chaotic Schoenberg … the musical bad boy of Germany" became its most famous, if unheard, representative.