Calf with Six Feet

Chicagoans have endured--and some have even enjoyed--some strange music recently. They have heard the sounds that Milhaud and Hindemith make, and last week they listened to the weirdest of all, the dissonant music of Austrian Arnold Schoenberg, the father of atonality. The Pro Arte String Quartet worked its way through the composer's cacophonous String Quartet No. 3 and then played his familiar Transfigured Night, which he wrote in 1899, before he ran off the melodic rails. When Quartet No. 3 was over, the loudest applause came from the sixth row, where lively, gnomelike Schoenberg, natty in a polka-dot bow tie, sat with his wife. The audience joined in more enthusiastically after Transfigured Night. Afterwards Schoenberg said: "I have to hear my music ten times to understand it myself. It needs frequent hearing."

But Schoenberg is convinced that his music is slowly winning public approval. Says he: "There is less resistance. Once I was beaten for my music, now younger men get some of the beating." Of Transfigured Night's belated popularity he crowed: "You see! In 1901 a critic said it was like a calf with six feet, like what you saw at a fair."

The inventor of a twelve-tone harmonic system still lives in Los Angeles, though he was retired from the U.C.L.A. faculty nearly two years ago. ("I was 70. The actual age of retirement is 65, but they made an exception. But even so ... I could have gone on; it was cruel.") He is finishing the last act of an opera about "Aaron as the statesman and Moses the philosopher," which he laid aside in 1932 because he got out of the mood. In the next five years he intends to complete five books, two of them on counterpoint. He usually has about eight pupils, each of whom pay about $200 a month.

In four lectures last week at the University of Chicago, Schoenberg tried to explain, among other things, what his music was up to. Sample: "I always attempted to produce something quite conventional, but I failed and it always, against my will, became something unusual. How right, then, is a music lover who refuses to appreciate music which even the composer did not want to write!"

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