ABSTRACT
Those words were from the preface to one of the most inuential books about music in the 20th century-Arnold Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony; and they sparked off a revolution in music, every bit as vast as the upheaval in physics I talked about in the last chapter. Schoenberg’s book was written in 1911, the same year as Bohr’s paper on the structure of the atom. Just as Bohr was a watershed in physics-bringing together the earlier experimentalists, and preparing the way for the later theorists: so also Schoenberg should be seen as a turning point between those who came before and after him.
