ABSTRACT
In the years immediately following the First World War, Arnold Schoenberg began to revise his 1911 textbook, the Harmonielehre [Theory of Harmony], for its second printing. In a chapter devoted to a discussion of the minor mode Schoenberg added the following curious passage:
[I]t is true that the dualism represented by major and minor has the power of a symbol suggesting higher forms of order: it reminds us of male and female and delimits the spheres of expression according to attraction and repulsion. These circumstances could of course be cited to support the false doctrine that these two modes are the only truly natural, the ultimate, the enduring. The will of nature is supposedly fulfilled in them. For me the implications are different: we have come closer to the will of nature. But we are still far enough from it; the angels, our higher nature, are asexual; and the spirit does not know repulsion. 1
