ABSTRACT
Arnold Schoenberg's invention of 'the method of composing with twelve tones' in the period immediately following World War I marked the arrival of a new phase for the New Music. Together with the retention of highly dissonant harmonic writing, music composed according to the method remained as uncompromising in its rejection of beauty as the music composed between 1908 and 1914. The Twelve-Tone Method is almost always understood as a recovery of order, a restoration of unity and comprehensibility to the otherwise admittedly chaotic language of atonal music. The gnostic theology implied in Gabriel's complex metaphor does explain Schoenberg's view of that necessity through the counter-intuitive nature of the archangel's musical analogy. The non-teleological, non-hierarchical 'unity' of the Twelve-Tone Method, then, is the musical approach appropriate to the gnostic vision of heaven and of life.
