USC, Family of Schoenberg Compromise

The University of Southern California and the heirs of Arnold Schoenberg have found some common ground in their long-running battle over the school’s treatment of the eminent composer and the massive, world-renowned collection of his scores, artifacts and papers.

The collection still will be pulled from USC--and probably from Southern California--but a settlement reached Wednesday puts an end to the ongoing legal battles.

The family agreed to allow USC to use the campus’ Schoenberg Institute for general music classes and activities until the Schoenbergs find a new home for the collection. In exchange, the university has promised to allow a satellite collection of Schoenberg items--donated by third parties--to move with the rest of the materials, as long as the individual donors agree. USC also agreed to pay $250,000 toward the cost of moving the collection.

The dispute began when the family objected to USC’s efforts to widen use of the building beyond events relating directly to the 20th-century composer and other modernists. The university, citing a space crunch, said it could no longer limit the use of the hall and wanted to open it up to more general music classes and concerts.

The 1995 decision to move the collection is considered a major cultural and scholarly loss for Los Angeles. It has been described by one Schoenberg scholar as “one of the greatest collections in the world of music.”

The entire collection, worth an estimated $3 million in the 1970s, is now appraised at $50 million, according to Schoenberg’s grandson E. Randol Schoenberg, who represented the heirs in the matter.

Another complaint from the composer’s children--Nuria Schoenberg Nono, Lawrence Schoenberg and Los Angeles Municipal judge Ronald R. Schoenberg--was that the family was excluded from USC’s decision. They said the university refused to convene the institute’s advisory board, on which the family holds three of seven seats.

The conflict caused the Schoenberg family to seek--and win--a preliminary injunction requiring USC to use the building only for classes and activities consistent with maintaining the Schoenberg legacy, as well as to cease copying Schoenberg collection materials without permission of the heirs.

The new agreement sets a deadline of Dec. 1, 1998, for the Schoenbergs to find a new home for the collection; until that time the university will fund and staff the institute. The university has offered to put the collection into storage indefinitely if a new home has not been found by the deadline.

E. Randol Schoenberg said Wednesday that the family was happy with the compromise, calling the issue of retaining the satellite collection the family’s most pressing concern.

“We sent a letter to the [satellite collection] donors asking if they wanted their items to remain with the collection when it is moved, and 99% said yes,” he said.

USC attorney Scott Edelman said the university was “not particularly happy” with the Schoenbergs’ letter to the donors, which he described as an alarmist “parade of horribles,” but added it is “in the best interest of scholarship” for the collection to remain intact.