Slouching Toward Lachenmann: Transfiguring the Night

The only person who can help poor Schoenberg now is a psychiatrist.

-Richard Strauss

"You're a slouch not to like it," he said to me one day.  "Studying ordered relationships is ultimately the best there is.  Order is everything."
-Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus

When I was in high school, the curriculum included a mandatory music appreciation class.  In addition to being mandatory, the class marshaled all the worst features of classroom instruction to make its case:  a huge amphitheater of a classroom, an otherworldly teacher who wasn’t able to communicate his love of music to the class, and an approach of pure lecture with the odd bit of listening thrown in.