his writings, at least Schoenberg’s own attitude to music seems alto-
gether Popperian. He decries innovation for its own sake, and argues that
like any great composer, he was motivated by the exploration of his
musical material. Whilst as mentioned above, he explicitly values origi-
nality as a precondition for art (“Art means New Art”), he tacitly con-
trasts this with innovation in a manner which Popper might well have
approved. Thus for Schoenberg, Bach is original because of the way in
which he engages with his musical material (for example, in deriving a
fugal theme and manipulating its successive entries). Whether he was
innovative in the sense of inventing new harmonies or musical forms,
say, or finding new instrumental combinations, is neither here nor there.
In this sense it is originality that matters, not innovation. Engagement
with one’s musical material—what Popper calls musical problem-solv-
ing—is all that is important. More generally still, by the 1920s the focus
of concern for “progressive” composers like Schoenberg had shifted
from post-Wagnerian expressionism to (often anti-Wagnerian) objec-
tivism, and the development of serial technique, which Schoenberg
announced to his students in 1923, is often seen as an aspect of this.
In fact, one could argue that Popper’s own account of harmonic evolu-
tion hardly squares with a criticism of progressivism. The progress from
plainchant to organum to counterpoint, which Popper describes as the out-
come of composers addressing musical problems within a given dogma,
seems little different from the development of serialism out of atonality,
and atonality out of extended chromatic harmony, for both describe a
process of musical evolution through creative problem-solving.
It is difficult to answer this. It is possible to square Popper’s account
of artistic change with all manner of modernist innovation, and it is a
contingent matter whether this was largely motivated by the desire for
originality or by a desire to solve purely musical problems. On the his-
torical point that Schoenberg’s writings suggest the latter, it is fair to sig-
nal that most of Schoenberg’s published comments are retrospective,
often written in the 1940s when he was no longer seen as avant-garde.
Earlier unpublished comments, such as his triumphant claim in 1910 to
have “broken all the barriers of a past aesthetic,”may be more typical of
his attitude during the Viennese years,^10 and contemporaries testify to
the sense of and enthusiasm for radical innovation in Schoenberg’s cir-
cle at the time.^11 But there remains Popper’s apparent ambivalence
towards musical progress. Popper seems to be aware of this, and allows
that we can have musical progress in certain respects, as in the opening
up of new musical possibilities and problems, an expansion of tech-
niques equivalent to a growth of musical knowledge, or technical104 Jonathan Le Cocq