SOURCE: "Some Notes on Schoenberg and the 'Method of Composing with Twelve Tone'," in Roger Sessions on Music: Collected Essays, edited by Edward T. Cone, Princeton University Press, 1952, pp. 370-5.

In the following essay, originally published in The Score in 1952, Sessions analyzes Schoenberg's twelve-tone compositional method.

Arnold Schoenberg sometimes said, "A Chinese philosopher speaks, of course, Chinese; the question is, what does he say?" The application of this to Schoenberg's music is quite clear. The notoriety which has, for decades, surrounded what he persisted in calling his "method of composing with twelve tones," has not only obscured his real significance, but, by focusing attention on the means rather than on the music itself, has often seemed a barrier impeding a direct approach to the latter. To some extent it has even, rather curiously, distorted the view of Schoenberg's historical achievement, of which the discovery of the twelve-tone method...