That music should exist at all is one of the most remarkable things about the world. To those who are moved by it intensely, it can seem both expressive of intimate urges and yet otherworldly, as if its making were more like a discovery of something outside of us than a product of pure human agency (as we saw in Chapter 1, this idea can be identified with Schopenhauer). For Arnold Schoenberg, one of the towering figures of twentieth-century music, something like the tension between the two ‘halves’ of this experience is inherent in all musical creation. In Harmonielehre (1911; 3rd edn 1922; translated into English 1978), his most celebrated work of theory, Schoenberg writes of the composer as a craftsman, working up materials, one imagines, like any other artist. And yet in seeming contrast to these others, who work on such relatively inert materials as, say, canvas, wood, or stone, the composer works upon an ‘organism’ – that is, something living, with its own autonomous plastic and developmental tendencies. Thus, Schoenberg cautions, if alterations made to a composition are ‘alien to the nature of this organism, then the majority of its consequences will be harmful’ too (p. 53). If, however, the composer strives resolutely towards ‘effects inherent’ in an organism's ‘nature’, compositional success will be ensured, for ‘it will always turn out that one has at the same time been obeying a necessity of this organism, that one has been promoting its developmental tendencies’ (p. 53).