ABSTRACT
Problems for Arnold Schoenberg are what the tone must solve in order to reach its potential, regardless of whether a piece of music has tonality. Problems in the tone, the dissonance, and the motive and/or the Grundgestalt are linked by a basic image-schematic complex that undergoes variation as the tone takes on various guises. This image-schematic complex also structures Heinrich Schenker's parallel concept of interruption, but interruption privileges repetition as procreation, while problems privilege variation. Schenker himself discusses problems of competing tones. He says that a piece of music "basically presents a genuine and continual conflict between the system and nature", that is, tones that want to be in the system or achieve a higher rank in the system. With regard to alienation and blindness, tonal and non-tonal music are not equivalent, even though they are wholly analogous on the logical level.
