Historicism, Routledge, 2002 (first English edition 1957), as well as references in
numerous short papers.- Unended Quest, 56.
- Interview in Joan Allen Smith: Schoenberg and His Circle: A Viennese Portrait,
Schirmer, 1986, 3. - Lesson of This Century, Routledge, 1997, 41.
- Unended Quest, 56
- Compare it with, for example, Schoenberg’s dictum that “Art means New Art”
(“New Music, Outmoded Music, Style and Idea” [1946] in Leonard Stein ed., Arnold
Schoenberg—Style and Idea: Selected Writings, Faber, 1975, 115), or Boulez’s defense
of innovation in the post-war period on the grounds that “We really must accustom our-
selves to the fact that there are periods of mutation in the history of music [which] ques-
tion the very principles that... have been generally accepted” (“Aesthetics and the
Fetishists” [1961] in Jean-Jacques Nattiez, ed., Orientations, Faber, 1986, 36). - In his Diariesthe theatre critic Kenneth Tynan captures a similar distinction
when he states that the only reasons to engage in creating art are either self-expression
or game-playing, the latter referring presumably to playing with the conventions or
manipulating the objective technique of an art form. More broadly, the distinction
between pure (abstract) and programmatic music, or even classical and romantic
impulses in music, embody the same general idea. - “Towards a Rational Theory of Tradition” in Conjectures and Refutations: The
Growth of Scientific Knowledge, London: Routledge, 1989, 131. Earlier in the article
(122) Popper mentions the “devastating” results of an attempt to perform Mozart’s
Requiemby a musical director “who was obviously untouched by the tradition which has
come down from Mozart.” - Stuckenschmidt cites the remark from a program to the first performance of
Schoenberg’s song cycle Das Buch der hängenden Gärten(op. 15). See Arnold
Schoenberg(tr. Edith Temple Roberts and Humphrey Searle), London: John Calder,
1959, 45. Stuckenschmidt’s account is rich in historicist interpretations of Schoenberg’s
innovations. For instance, with regard to this remark, Stuckenschmidt writes that
Schoenberg “was conscious of the irrevocability of this breakthrough: Today we know
that this process was not only subjectively justified by Schoenberg’s genius, but that it
was a historical necessity, that since the introduction of the tempered system about 1700
the development of harmony was resolutely striving towards the results which
Schoenberg had the courage to present to the world” (Ibid., 49). This was probably the
dominant view in the 1950s of the importance of atonality and serialism. - For example, the violinist Rudolf Kolisch, when asked whether the twelve-tone
method developed by Schoenberg in the early 1920s, seemed like a development of tra-
dition or a radical departure, replied: “it appeared as something new. We could not see
this [i.e. as development] from this perspective yet. That appeared really as something
very fundamentally drastic.” The expressionist writer and painter Oskar Kokoschka
similarly notes: “We all thought it’s themusic, so there was no dispute about it. It was
just thefact. All the others were behind and didn’t understand it, so we thought.” Joan
Allen Smith: Schoenberg and his Circle: A Viennese Portrait, New York: Schirmer,
1986, 217. - Ernst Gombrich wrote a very fine essay commenting on Popper’s approach to
music where he reads it largely in terms of a critique of historicism, and Popper accepts
this without comment in his own response to Gombrich. See E.H. Gombrich, “The Logic
of Vanity Fair: Alternatives to Historicism in the Study of Fashions, Style, and Taste” in
212 Notes to Pages 93–105