ABSTRACT
The curious nature of a bifurcated culture has received an explanation: the culture of preservation and the culture of innovation rest on diametrically opposed metaphysical premises. The impulse of modernism in music arises out of an already bifurcated world as described by Kantian metaphysics. The culture of musical classicism persists precisely because it affords an aural way of conserving the sense of the goodness of temporal existence and the concept of the ideal itself. The legacy of Arnold Schoenberg's achievement was the end of classical tonality as the ordering of consonance, harmony and melody around a tonic, and the emergence of a school of composers interested in the strict control of all musical parameters. The trend toward the complete serialization of all musical elements after World War II, inspired by Anton Webern's taut control of pitch sequences, only served to deepen the rejection of musical order and being.
