1. It is debatable whether a single overarching canon exists at all since its definition has proved so fluid and varied. Nonetheless, the idea of a canon has considerable conceptual force if only because it implies the existence of a coherent set of value assumptions.

2. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 51.

3. Charles Altieri, Canons and Consequences: Reflections on the Ethical Force of Imaginative Ideals (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1990), 52.

4. See Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975); and "Modernity — An Incomplete Project," in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), 3-15.

5. It goes without saying that the principal thrust of such arguments is directed toward the academy, where conscious decisions shape curricula and reading lists. In the real world political and market forces significantly complicate any planned articulation of a cultural program.

6. I am well aware that the idea of a "musical canon" is problematic, though I believe that musical canonicity is a concept that Schoenberg would have understood and endorsed in both its narrow disciplinary (pedagogical) and more broadly repertorial senses. It is readily apparent that Schoenberg embraced the idea of a body of works that was exclusive, exemplary, and normative.
Joseph Kerman was among the first to address the specific application of canonicity to music in "A Few Canonic Variations," Critical Inquiry 10/1 (September 1983), 107-125. He cautions in particular about the need for differentiating between a canon and a repertory. "A canon," he writes, "is an idea; a repertory is a program of action" (107), adding elsewhere, "repertories are determined by performers, canons, by critics" (114).
Other important contributions to the discussion of musical canonicity include the essays in Katherine Bergeron and Philip V. Bohlman, eds., Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Marcia J. Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); and William Weber, "The Eighteenth-Century Origins of the Musical Canon," Journal of the Royal Musical Association 114/1 (1989), 6-17.

7. Kerman ("A Few Canonic Variations") traces the historical roots of the idea of a musical canon to those early early-nineteenth-century German critics and aestheticians such as E.T.A. Hoffmann who sought to "endow music with a history" (120). As such, the enterprise of musical-canon formation was both conscious and programmatic, nurtured by "a strong component of nationalism along with historicism, organicism . . . and what Carl Dahlhaus has aptly called `the metaphysics of instrumental music'" (114). By the end of the century the repertory and its (predominantly German) canonic core extended back to the early eighteenth century (Bach and Handel) and up to and including Brahms. Of course, this development was closely related to the complex of economic, political, and social phenomena that created a network of institutions and practices that served both to stimulate and to stabilize cultural life. A stable repertory was both a precondition of and a corollary to the establishment of performing institutions such as orchestras and concert series, as well as a mediating linguistic apparatus for music critics, journalists, and historians. Weber ("The Eighteenth-Century Origins of the Musical Canon'') offers valuable caveats to several of Kerman's principal points, arguing that musical-canon formation began in the eighteenth century and evolved unobtrusively from the practice of cultivating selected older works. However, the actual origins or dynamics of canon formation are of little relevance to a discussion of Schoenberg, for whom canonicity was an inherited concept, largely colored by the legacy of Romanticism.

8. See, for instance, Schoenberg's 1922 essay "About Ornaments, Primitive Rhythms, etc. and Bird Song"; "Folk-Music and Art-Music" of c. 1926; and "Old and New Counterpoint" of 1928 — all published in Style and Idea, 298-311, 167-169, and 288-289, respectively.

9. See in particular Schoenberg's 1940 essay "Art and the Moving Pictures," in Style and Idea, 153-157. While urging the motion-picture industry to fulfill a higher cultural mission ("I had dreamed of a dramatization of Balzac's Séraphita, or Strindberg's To Damascus, or the second part of Goethe's Faust, or even Wagner's Parsifal "), Schoenberg nonetheless acknowledges that the institutions of popular culture had produced works that "had the same appeal to the more highly educated as to the average citizen," works that "satisfied the whole of a nation, or even of the entire word, like Mickey Mouse, or some of the films of Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and the Marx brothers; like some operas of Rossini, operettas of Offenbach and Johann Strauss, and plays by popular poets like Raimund and Nestroy; or popular music of Strauss, Offenbach, Foster, Gershwin, and many jazz composers" (154).

10. Karl Kraus, Sprüche und Widersprüche (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977), 157.

11. These ideas are developed more fully in my paper "Craft and Kultur: Karl Weigl, Vienna, and the Question of Mastery," delivered at the conference "Viennese Crosscurrents," University of Chicago, 1-2 December 1989.

12. The presence in Vienna of reactionaries like Schenker and progressives like Schoenberg should not obscure the fact that both "wings" were essentially conservative in nature. This is evident above all from the strongly articulated moral didacticism in their writings. The difference was one of emphasis. Whereas Schenker fought offensive and defensive battles against radical innovation with cultural political arguments, Schoenberg defended himself against reactionary critics and the inroads of mass culture by espousing an aristocracy of the spirit; Schoenberg cited the canon not to resist stylistic change but to enlist "eternal values" on its behalf.

13. See the 1919 proposal "Music" for the "Guide-Lines for a Ministry of Art," ed. Adolf Loos, in Style and Idea, 369-373, esp. 369.

14. Schoenberg, Style and Idea, 172-174, esp. 173.

15. Anti-Semitic agitation in the resort town of Mattsee, near Salzburg, forced Schoenberg and his family to break off their summer vacation there in July 1921. At the end of 1925 the Prussian Ministry of Culture appointed Schoenberg to succeed Ferruccio Busoni as the director of a master class at the Prussian Academy of the Arts.

16. I discuss these generational tensions in Franz Schreker 1878-1934: A Cultural Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), especially in the chapter "A Clash of Generations," 155-175.

17. This stance is complicated by Schoenberg's embrace of Judaism and the obviously awkward cross-loyalties with his German heritage. In a letter of 19 July 1938 to Jakob Klatzkin, Schoenberg wrote, "The non-Jews are `conservative,' and the Jews have never shown any interest in my music. And now, into the bargain, in Palestine they are out to develop, artificially, an authentically Jewish kind of music, which rejects what I have achieved." Schoenberg Letters, no. 178, 205. Of particular note is the letter written to Frank Pelleg of 26 April 1951 concerning Schoenberg's election as honorary president of the Israel Academy of Music. He emphasizes the "technical, intellectual, and ethical demands of our art" as well as the "morality of art" and envisions an academy "fit to serve as a counterblast to this world that is in so many respects giving itself up to amoral, success-ridden materialism." He writes in conclusion, "For just as God chose Israel to be the people whose task it is to maintain the pure, true, Mosaic monotheism despite all persecution, despite all affliction, so too it is the task of Israeli musicians to set the world an example of the old kind that can make our souls function again as they must if mankind is to evolve any higher.'' Schoenberg Letters, no. 257, 287.

18. See Schoenberg's 1934 essay "Why No Great American Music," in Style and Idea, 178.

19. See "Teaching and Modern Trends in Music" (1938), in Style and Idea, 376.

20. Schoenberg seems to have made his peace with some, if not all, of his competitors for influence upon America's young composers. In a letter to G.F. Stegmann of 26 January 1949 he writes, "It would not be so bad to imitate Stravinsky, or Bartók, or Hindemith, but worse is that they have been taught by a woman of Russian-French descent, who is a reactionary and has had much influence on many composers. One can only wish that this influence might be broken and the real talents of the Americans be allowed to develop freely." Schoenberg Letters, no. 233, 266. A little over three months later, however, Schoenberg wrote ruefully to Rudolf Kolisch on 12 April 1949, "The tendency is to suppress European influences and encourage nationalistic methods of composition constructed on the pattern adopted in Russia and other such places." Schoenberg Letters, no. 237, 270.

21. Particularly revealing in this regard is the 1934 essay "Why No Great American Music," in Style and Idea, 176-181. In an undated letter (c. 1944) to Lester Trimble, Schoenberg wrote, "I see you are aiming at a contemporary American style in some of these compositions. This is of course perfectly all right. It is your task, all of you young American talents, to create a style of your own, and it is every single man's duty to contribute as much as possible to this goal." Schoenberg goes on to caution: "On the other hand there are two points on account of which I would advocate that everybody should become perfectly acquainted with the achievements of the masters of the past, with the development of the musical language up to our times. Firstly: after some time most of these national characteristics fade and only the idea remains. Secondly: It would be too great a loss, if this technique, produced by centuries [were to] be abandoned and a new technique started at the point where the European started long, long ago."

22. As, for instance, when he writes in 1948 in "Turn of Time," "I know that history repeats itself, and I understand that works produced at a turn of time — that is, when a new period is in the process of development — have always been viciously attacked. I expect history to repeat itself this time also; real merits, if they are present, will not be ignored, will not be forgotten." Schoenberg, Style and Idea, 139-141, esp. 141.

23. Clement Greenberg, "Towards a Newer Laocoon," in Perceptions and Judgments, 1939-1944, vol. 1 of Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 23-38, esp. 32.

24. Clement Greenberg, "Modernist Painting" (1965), in Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, ed. Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison (London: Harper and Row and Open University Press, 1982), 5-6.
Some feminist criticism posits a more sinister role for modernism. Paraphrasing such arguments, Marcia J. Citron describes how "modernism arose as a means of countering the feminization of literature and music. This placed men in the uneasy position of having to react to foremothers, thus presenting a fundamental problem for Oedipal resolution. One outcome of this male dilemma was the formation of an aesthetic intended to exclude women, namely modernism" ( Gender and the Musical Canon, 50).

25. See Christopher Hailey, "Musical Expressionism: The Search for Autonomy," in Expressionism Reassessed, ed. Shulamith Behr, David Fanning, and Douglas Jarman (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1993), 103-111. Jost Hermand pursues a related argument to make the same point in "Musikalischer Expressionismus," in his essay collection Beredte Töne: Musik in historischen Prozess (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1992), 97-117.

26. Schoenberg's conscious articulation of canonic principles served to deemphasize sociohistorical context and stress structural and stylistic constants. There is a striking corollary with this modernist appropriation of historical styles and contemporary efforts by Hugo Riemann and others to make style the basis of music-historical narrative. See Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon, 32.

27. A related phenomenon has been the proliferation of a school of formalist analysis that has increasingly concerned itself with performative operations divorced from any larger context, a self-validating and self-perpetuating circle of enterprise more concerned with method than meaning. In the decade since Joseph Kerman argued this point in Contemplating Music (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), musicology has undergone a striking transformation in which criticism and historicizing tendencies have acquired new relevance and authority. See Kerman's "American Musicology in the 1990s," Journal of Musicology 9/2 (1991), 131-144.

28. Citron points out the similarities between the closed circle of connoisseurs at the Verein evenings and the social settings for music before 1750 ( Gender and the Musical Canon, 29). In this context there is an intriguing overlap between the ideas behind the Verein and the aesthetic theory of "absorbed presence" formulated by Michael Fried in his discussion of Diderot and eighteenth-century aesthetics of painting in Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). Diderot abhorred theatricality and proposed an ideal of unselfconscious participation in the work of art (which by its subject matter and style must invite such absorption). "The object of his distaste," Fried writes, "was not exaggeration or caricature or politesse as such but the awareness of an audience, of being beheld, that they implied. And it was above all else the apparent extinction of that awareness, by virtue of a figure's absolute engrossment or absorption in an action, activity, or state of mind, that he demanded of works of pictorial art" (99). To be sure, Schoenberg's ideal was not the naive absorption of Diderot, but rather an intellectual immersion that was conscious and alert. Nonetheless, there is something of the same paradox in the resulting relationship between the work of art and its beholder. "Diderot's conception of painting," Fried writes, ''rested ultimately upon the supreme fiction that the beholder did not exist, that he was not really there, standing before the canvas" (103). But, as we all know, art and music presuppose their audience, so the work of art must at once attract the beholder and command his absorption, while negating his presence: "only by establishing the fiction of his absence or nonexistence could his actual placement before and enthrallment by the painting be secured" (103). Similarly, with the Verein ideal Schoenberg created a setting in which the work of art existed only for the listener, who was, however, invisible — at least according to the conventions of the concert experience.
Hans-Georg Gadamer is still closer to Schoenberg in his neo-Kantian apologia for modern art in "The Relevance of the Beautiful," in The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3-53. He argues that older representational and twentieth-century abstract styles share the demand that they be taken as an autonomous experience. "The identity of the work," he writes, "is not guaranteed by any classical or formalist criteria, but is secured by the way in which we take the construction of the work upon ourselves as a task" (28). In musical matters, incidentally, Gadamer makes clear that his aesthetic perspective derives from canonical priorities at whose pinnacle sits "absolute music, that great achievement of musical abstraction in Western culture which reached a peak of development in imperial Austria with the classical Viennese school" (38).

29. John Guillory has made a similar plea "to resist homogenizing canonical works" and suggests instead historicizing them and reinstating "historical context as a ground of interpretation." John Guillory, "Canon,'' in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 244.

30. Barbara Herrnstein Smith has made the point succinctly: "we make texts timeless by suppressing their temporality" ( Contingencies of Value, 49-50). Harold Bloom bemoans the similar, if more profound, phenomenon in his discussion of the biblical text he attributes to the author he calls "J." "Few cultural paradoxes are so profound, or so unnerving, as the process of religious canonization by which an essentially literary work becomes a sacred text. When script becomes Scripture, reading is numbed by taboo and inhibition." The Book of J, ed. Harold Bloom, trans. David Rosenberg (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), 35.

31. Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 238.

32. Ibid., 176.

33. The stylistic and aesthetic multiplicity in the new music, programming practices, and recording projects of the last thirty to forty years significantly anticipated the critical and scholarly formulations of the 1970s and 1980s, including postmodernism, deconstructionism, poststructuralism, and feminism. And musical scholarship has been at least twenty years behind developments in the study of literature, art, and history.

34. This was no less true of the nineteenth century, in which most genres were outside the preserve of the classical teaching canon. Lieder and opera, for instance, laid little claim to canonic status and were only loosely bound by canonic rules. The century's major innovations in harmonic language and form took place, as it were, on the margins, often in "extramusical" terrain and in genres that were not sanctioned by or transmitted through the academy. These extraterritorial challenges undermined the preeminence of canonic genres, which were threatened from within by imitation and academicism. Schoenberg's emphasis upon process and procedure served to deemphasize the primacy of genre as an emblem of canonicity.

35. It is interesting to note how many of the later works are specifically tied to particular events or settings. The political/historical references of the Survivor from Warsaw and the Ode to Napoleon come readily to mind, but the Suite for String Orchestra, the Kol Nidre, and the Organ Variations had ready practical applications for a specifically American context.

36. The most famous example of these is Die Jaokobsleiter and the related projects that preceded it.

37. Schoenberg's historicism was strongly colored by the pervasive historicism of late-nineteenth-century Vienna, which is a major theme in Carl Schorske's Finde-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), especially the chapter titled "The Ringstrasse, Its Critics, and the Birth of Urban Modernism," 24-115. Other aspects of Schoenberg's worldview that are distinctly related to his time would include his attitude toward women (most particularly manifest in his stage works), religion, and philosophy, as well as his own political sensibilities. These elements were largely suppressed in the Schoenberg literature of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, out of an impulse of self-censorship that Barbara Herrnstein Smith ( Contingencies of Value, 49-50) observes is typical of the treatment of works of canonical status. "For one thing," she writes, when the value of a work is seen as unquestionable, those of its features that would, in a noncanonical work, be found alienating — for example, technically crude, philosophically naive, or narrowly topical — will be glozed over or backgrounded. In particular, features that conflict intolerably with the interests and ideologies of subsequent subjects . . . will be repressed or rationalized, and there will be a tendency among humanistic scholars and academic critics to "save the text" by transferring the locus of its interest to more formal and structural features and/or by allegorizing its potentially alienating ideology to some more general ("universal") level where it becomes more tolerable and also more readily interpretable in terms of contemporary ideologies.

38. Connor, Postmodernist Culture, 99.