CULTURE WATCH : Local Dissonance

Arnold Schoenberg was a great composer. The University of Southern California is a great university. It can only distress admirers of both that relations between the composer’s heirs and the current administration of the university have worsened to the point that the heirs want to strip the campus of the priceless Schoenberg collection of scores, manuscripts, tapes and memorabilia.

No new home has been selected, and the best universities may well be reluctant to capitalize on another institution’s mistakes or misfortune. That fact has aroused fear on the part of the musical community that, despite the family’s assurances to the contrary, the superb collection may yet be broken up or transferred to inferior or remote accommodations.

At the moment, the university is resigned to losing the collection, and the Schoenbergs, to quote Lawrence Schoenberg, believe that “there is no reason to expect or think that any reconciliation could occur.” But if Southern California, to which Schoenberg fled from the Nazis, has a vote to cast, it is surely cast in favor of keeping the collection both together and in this region. Is there no outside arbiter whom both sides would accept and by whose decisions both would agree to be bound?

Despite the apparent resignation of both sides to a bitter divorce, no one who honors Arnold Schoenberg’s “Transfigured Night”--a composition that gives miraculous musical form to the triumph of love over seemingly irreparable estrangement--should conclude too quickly that light cannot break even from this darkness.