Leopold Spinner a composer in a unique position. Can there be another living composer of comparable integrity, mastery and imagination who is so little known and so seldom performed? At the age of 68 he is, I believe, one of the outstanding composers of today; and yet those who have had only a cursory glance at his published scores seem to have dismissed them as mere imitations of his master, Webern. This view misses the point completely; nevertheless one can understand why cursory glances lead to such conclusions. To quote Spinner himself: …more important for me and much more difficult to comment upon is the ‘first and simplest answer’ which ‘leaps from the pages of my published scores’, namely that I revere Webern's music. Yes, this is quite true; I do, very much; and I don't see why it should be a gross impertinence to ask such a question, even if the answer does already leap from the pages of my scores. However, I also have the greatest admiration for the music of Mozart and Haydn, Bach, Beethoven and Schubert, Brahms, Schumann, Bruckner and Mahler, Schoenberg and Berg…. Might it not be that such more or less common characteristics [between related composers of the same period] are not only the expression of personal implications, but are also the reflection of fundamental historical considerations determining the evolution of purely musical concepts? I believe that if the true historic significance of Webern's music were better understood in all its aspects—for instance, the predominance and total engagement of motivic obligation as the structurally unifying factor in a complete fusion between traditional homphonic concepts and the strictest polyphonic presentation—then perhaps it might be possible to refer in factual terms to purely musical concepts and leave all reverence and admiration to take care of themselves.

Schoenberg's ‘atonal’ (i.e. nontonal, pre-serial) music continues to offer stubborn resistance to analysis. The co-existence within the oeuvre of widely diverging, even conflicting, ‘linguistic’ directions has resulted in a theoretical literature inclined to illuminate the individual work or specific technical feature rather than to lay the foundations for useful analytical generalizations.

The early years of Arnold Schoenberg's career as a composer were marked by much opposition. Apparently very few people could tolerate his music's strange new sounds or seemingly incomprehensible organization for any length of time, and the performance of a Schoenberg work frequently resulted in scandal. Then, of course, his introduction of the so-called ‘atonal’ style of writing must have seemed to some to be an assault upon the very foundations of music itself, a blasphemy demanding the strongest condemnation.

What can be told about music that the music itself can't tell? Only how it came to be written.

It is instructive to hear what one composer says about another because, no matter how biased, he quite knows what he's talking about. It is less instructive to hear what a composer says about himself because, no matter how sincere, he doesn't quite know what he's talking about. A composer can clarify his method to others, but not his esthetic. He can tell how he wrote his piece, but not why. His why is the piece. All else is a smokescreen through which he explains what you're supposed to hear rather than what you do hear. Unless the smokescreen itself is his music.