In his 1968 book Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey wrote:
“In the desert I am reminded of something quite different — the bleak, thin-textured work of men like Berg, Schoenberg, Ernst Krenek, Webern and the American, Elliott Carter. Quite by accident, no doubt, although both Schoenberg and Krenek lived part of their lives in the Southwest, their music comes closer than any other I know to representing the apartness, the otherness, the strangeness of the desert. Like certain aspects of this music, the desert is also a-tonal, cruel, clear, inhuman, neither romantic nor classical, motionless and emotionless, at one and the same time — another paradox — both agonized and deeply still.”
(page 285)
In his 1989 book Schoenberg and the new music, Carl Dahlhaus paraphrases the thesis of Hanns Eisler's 1935 manifesto "Some Observations on the Behaviour of Worker Singers and Musicians in Germany" by saying:
"That it expresses an inhuman state of affairs is its merit, because it conceals nothing; and at the same time this is its misfortune, for by being a mirror of inhumanity it becomes inhuman itself."
And then goes on to say:
"Eisler's thesis was challenged by Adorno's counter-thesis which proposed that music is human precisely because it speaks of inhumanity and resists it. And it performs -- contrary to Eisler's verdict -- a critical function in that it does not transfigure or obscure what exists but calls it by name"
(page 28)
Adorno said, in his 1947 book Philosophy of Modern Music :
"The inhumanity of art must triumph over the inhumanity of the world for the sake of the humane. Works of art attempt to solve the riddles designed by the world to devour man. The world is a sphynx, the artist is blinded Oedipus, and it is works of art of the type resembling his wise answer which plunged the sphynx into the abyss. Thus all art stands in opposition to mythology. In the elemental 'material' of art, the 'answer'—the only possible and correct answer is ever present, but not yet defined. To give this answer, to express what is there, and to fulfill the commandment of ambiguity through a singularity which has always been present in the commandment, is at the same time the new which extends beyond the old, precisely by virtue of being sufficient to it. For this reason the total seriousness of artistic technique lies in continually designing schemata of the familiar for that which has already existed. This seriousness is today so much greater, since the alienation present in the consistency of artistic technique forms the very substance of the work of art. The shocks of incomprehension, emitted by artistic technique in the age of its meaninglessness, undergo a sudden change. They illuminate the meaningless world. Modern music sacrifices itself to this effort. It has taken upon itself all the darkness and guilt of the world. Its fortune lies in the perception of misfortune; all of its beauty is in denying itself the illusion of beauty. No one wishes to become involved with art—individuals as little as collectives. It dies away unheard, without even an echo. If time crystallizes around that music which has been heard, revealing its radiant quintessence, music which has not been heard falls into empty time like an impotent bullet. Modern music spontaneously aims towards this last experience, evidenced hourly in mechanical music. Modern music sees absolute oblivion as its goal. It is the surviving message of despair from the shipwrecked."
(page 132)
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