WHEN one eats something that shouldn’t have been eaten or drinks a hostile variety of spirits, normally one’s body tries to cleanse itself and restore order by way of vomiting. Afterwards, unless one happens to belong to a very rare and questionable specimen of human being, one will naturally dispose of the vomit with great haste, for its stench and sight tend to be of the extremely offensive sort.

But let us for a moment forget about the human beings who are offended by the sordid, the deranged, the atonal and the scatological. They really are nothing more than a narrow-minded herd whose intellect cannot comprehend the intricate workings of modern society’s high art and culture. Yes, let us forget about that lot of chauvinistic paleoconservatives and instead focus on the few, the rare, the questionable, who for over a 100 years have been zealously devoted to the creation, upbringing and promotion of cultural excrement. Now that we are focused in, there would be no other way to begin than by sharing something said by the cultural Merkava that was Arnold Schoenberg (possibly after being questioned about why he vomited so often) : “Had times been ‘normal’ then the music of our time would have been very different.”

Had Schoenberg’s vomiting begun during the Great War, that statement would have had some validity. Considering, however, that the copious amounts of vomit came shooting forth beginning 1908 when he rejected tonality, it really is a pity that he chose not to elaborate on his statement or at least acquaint us with the definition of “normal” according to the Schoenberg Dictionary of English (now lost, tragically).

But for the sake of the argument, let us assume that the man actually did live in abnormal times and that these times affected his spirit the way rotten eggs affect the stomach, and consequently he was forced to purge his system by way of atonal and expressionistic vomiting. Let us assume this while turning a blind eye to the many contemporaries of Schoenberg who continued to compose beautiful music in the face of these “abnormal” times. And then let us ask ourselves why he was compelled to swim and bask in this vomit—as opposed to destroying it and doing the world a favour—and why his patrons were compelled to swindle European society into joining their Schoenberg for a swim.

What kind of a person counters excrement with excrement? When one’s spirit is feeling suppressed by the degenerate “abnormality” of today’s world and the entities populating it, does one change one’s desktop wallpaper to La Mademoiselles d’Avignon  and put on Schoenberg’s Fantasie?

In a conversation with Glenn Gould, Yehudi Menuhin described Schoenberg’s music rather ingeniously: “The only contrast there could be is between sound and no sound, and that’s probably why there are so many pauses.”