It is a truism often ignored that the world's thinkers, its philosophers and scientists, its literary artists, its statesmen, its holy scriptures, have all wielded their power abroad and over centuries, for good and for ill, through the minds of translators. Plato, Aristotle, the Bible, Thomas Aquinas and Confucius, Descartes, Newton, Goethe, Darwin and Freud, Marx, Churchill, Roosevelt and Chairman Mao; musicians, too; we who are more or less fluent in the one language once considered "universal" must nevertheless resort to translators.
Quite naturally Arnold Schoenberg anticipated publication in other languages of his Harmonielehre, his first major literary work. He no doubt hoped for such publication, for translation of one's work opens it to a wider audience and may enhance its prestige. However, he had observed that a work may not pass unscathed through the brains of a translator. He remarked that Strindberg's prestige was not enhanced by German translations of his works.1 And Schoenberg certainly had no need to be compromised in his ongoing battles with his critics by imprecise translations of his views. Thus a former pupil who was translating some of Schoenberg's essays had to endure a severe scolding. He was to stop altering the original text. "You put bits in, leave things out, make something long-winded out of what was said clearly and concisely, choose uncharacteristic expressions to replace pertinent ones, and even go so far as to change the structure of paragraphs. . . . Your changes go beyond the limit of what even my Americanised conscience can permit."2 The composer habitually took pains to express himself precisely, whether he was using words or musical notes, and he expected the translation to represent just as precisely what he had written in German. For he knew that most readers must hold the author, not the translator, responsible for what they find in the translation.
The conscientious translator wants to present precisely what his author has written. The translator must of course rewrite the book, put it all into other words, and in a different language at that; yet the translation is supposed to be essentially the same work as the original. The translator is supposed to imitate, to duplicate, all the essential features of the original, except for its specific language, down to the smallest details—as should one who transcribes an orchestral piece for piano. He should capture not merely the gist but the nuances of meaning and every nuance of expression as well.
The word "duplicate," however, really pushes it too far. In a story of Jorge Luis Borges a translator labors his whole life through to produce an absolutely faithful translation of Don Quijote—into Spanish, "with the very same words, sentences, and order as in Cervantes." Who can imagine a more faithful translation? In another story by Borges "a geographer obsessed by an ever increasing need for precision . . . draws larger and larger maps until finally they become as great as the country itself and cover it entirely."3 Obviously, a translation cannot be a xerox copy of the original text. How faithfully, then, should, or can, the translator imitate the original? How freely may he translate and still honorably attribute the book to its original author? This is the translator's dilemma.
You need not even know another language to experience this dilemma for yourself. Just try imitating exactly what someone has said but in altogether different words of the same language. This too is translation. And you see that even in the same language you inevitably distort the original; you cannot imitate it exactly, for no two words, even in the same language, "mean" exactly the same. And no word is absolutely unambiguous, absolutely free of all contextual and personal ifs, ands, or buts. The translator, moreover, must ordinarily imitate his author's work in a different linguistic system, with its completely different set of words that are strung together according to a different set of rules. Each linguistic system expresses a unique culture; and each system is laden with the ambiguities inherent in the natural languages. Need we go on to mention the fact that the author, the translator, and the reader have each their own personal dialects within their own linguistic communities?4
No wonder then that opinions vary on how the translator should respond to his dilemma, on the extent of distortion that is tolerable, or even on what may constitute distortion. In translating Aristotle's Poetics, Kenneth A. Telford took pains to avoid any personal interpretations; he strove "to make as literal a reproduction of Aristotle's words as is consistent with readability. . . . To the fullest extent possible, consistent with intelligibility, a single Greek word has been rendered by a single English word."5 (To his 56 pages of translated text he has appended 152 footnotes and 84 pages of "Analysis.") On the other hand, hear Jacques Barzun on translating Hector Berlioz's Evenings with the Orchestra: "The principle I have followed in translating, here and elsewhere, may be described as recomposition. It answers the question: 'How would one express precisely this thought in English today?'"6 (Aside from the 376-page text of the translation, the translator has supplied 11 pages of introductory material and an occasional brief footnote to the text.) Most translators probably follow one or the other of these procedures, varying in the degree of emphasis on literalness or freedom. But how do we distinguish the "literal" translator from the "free" translator?
The literal translator can hardly bear to translate for fear he will do violence to the original text; the free translator would do no violence to the reader. The literal translator diffidently follows the text, noun by noun, verb by verb, metaphor by metaphor, using cognates wherever possible, copying the original sentence structure, in short, trying to change the original as little as possible. Quite often, what he produces so lacks fluency that for all his modesty and reverence for the text, his translation is a caricature of that text, doing violence to both text and reader. The literal translator may understand quite well his author's meaning, but the reader of his translation is hard pressed to decipher that meaning. And if the translator does not serve his reader well, has he served the original text well?
Of course the free translator, at the other extreme, may in effect arrogantly write his own book and attribute it to the author. (This poor soul, the author, usually has little chance to defend himself against any violence done to him.) Between these extremes the responsible translator has to define, for himself at least, and for his particular text—and for his projected readers—the limits of literalness and freedom.
Reason seems to favor the translator who tries to translate the precise sense of the original, rather than its very words and syntax—except when the original word or syntax is itself inseparable from the sense. He acknowledges that he must interpret the original and that interpretation always carries some subjective taint. He thus strives to serve faithfully both the original author and the reader of the translation by interpreting the sense of the original as purely as he can and then expressing that in the language of the translation with as little distortion as possible, so that it reads as if it had been originally conceived and expressed in this language.
As we look at a few aspects of Schoenberg's Theory of Harmony that illustrate the translator's problems of interpretation and restatement, we shall at least glimpse important facets of Schoenberg's career as teacher, composer, and thinker, for his textbook of harmony is no ordinary, stylistically anonymous textbook. It contains virtually everything about chords that is to be found in any other textbook of harmony, with some unusual twists and in much more exhaustive detail; but it is also a panorama of Schoenberg's personality. Alongside detailed descriptions of chords and directions for using them, he gives fatherly advice to the eager pupil. He rages at the slaves of convention, he describes what it is like to be an innovative artist, he asserts his views of art and life and death. Schoenberg could not vacuum-pack harmony and seal it off from the world; it is a part of the world, as are the pupils. Harmony is a part of music, music a part of the world, and the pupil should be shown the manifold relations between himself and harmony and music and the world. But even if he keeps strictly to harmony, the pupil should be shown not only the what of harmony, but also the why, and whether it has to be so.
Thus if we write of translating Schoenberg, we write inevitably of Schoenberg's ideas. Now both topics—the wealth of his ideas and the challenge of translating them—quickly push one's writing to unseemly lengths, unseemly at least for an article, however generous the space allotted it. Let us then touch on a few points and hope to suggest a bit more than space here allows.
ON SENSE AND SYNTAX
"This book I have learned from my pupils."7
So begins Schoenberg's Theory of Harmony. A one-sentence paragraph. Except for the placement of "have" and "learned," it is translated here word for word. Such one-to-one matching (with only minor syntactic adjustments) will sometimes work surprisingly well in translating from German to English, since these languages are cognate. But the translator must therefore beware of such facile substitution of English words for the German; for it rarely yields the best translation, and quite often such translation is downright unacceptable. In general, let us repeat, we should translate sense, not syntax, not words.
But the sense of Schoenberg's opening declaration happens to come through nicely in this literal translation. That was not apparent to one of two of the writers who have cited this sentence in English. Embarrassed by such literalness, they tried to show some effort in translating it rather than just letting it fall into English; or perhaps embarrassed by its disarming simplicity, they tried to make it appear a bit more sophisticated. Whatever their motives, it is true that we do not ordinarily begin sentences in English with the grammatical object—"this book"; but we may do so on occasion for emphasis. Moreover, it may seem a bit childlike to say "I learned the book": and it is rather startling to read an author's assertion that he "learned" his book, the one we are about to read, before he wrote it, presumably, or as he wrote it. Perhaps we should then "recompose" that sentence so: "The contents of this book represent what I have learned about harmony and its pedagogy from my own first-hand experience in studying and composing music and in trying to transmit what I have learned to my pupils (not, mind you, from the study of a number of important textbooks)." Of course that goes much too far. It is an attempt to explain rather than translate Schoenberg's statement. Schoenberg himself explains it, at length, in the course of his book. The translator need not; in fact, he must not, for the sense of Schoenberg's opener includes not only its content—that the book is a result of his own musical and pedagogical experience—but also the simplicity of his statement, its motivic pregnancy (demanding growth), its childlike use of "learned," its getting right to the point. It is an eight-word sentence set apart as a paragraph; it is an announcement, a fanfare. How else could we translate it?
THIS BOOK I HAVE LEARNED FROM MY PUPILS.
Such word-by-word translation does not usually work as well. Take for example Schoenberg's assertion that the genius is a lawgiver, born with inner laws that set precedents for future mankind.8 This sentence has been quoted by various authors in translation as follows: "The laws of the nature of the genius are the laws of future mankind." The idea of the original is not unduly impaired; but those nouns march across the page rather more monotonously in English than in their original German syntax.
A well-known characteristic of German syntax is its penchant for seemingly endless sentences. English sentences, too, can sometimes run on to considerable length; but in general English does not tolerate the lengths to which German can go. Thus the translator must discover the hierarchy of discrete notions that constitute such a sentence and the sense of the whole, and try to express all that in English, often with two or more sentences. The following long arch of a sentence may serve as an example.9 It forms the center of a paragraph, which begins and ends with relatively short, simple sentences. (It concerns the resolution of a dissonant note; must it move step by step downward, as generally described? Or may it not also move upward, or be sustained, or even skip away?)
IF IT IS CLEAR
THAT DISSONANCES COULD HARDLY HAVE COME ABOUT
as our pedagogical method,
to make them more easily understood,
presents them:
that is, by topping off the triad
with yet another third,
but rather as notated coincidences or
embellishments of the melodic line,
THEN WE CAN READILY GRANT
THAT THE OTHER FORMS OF RESOLUTION CAN ALSO OCCUR.
Unfortunately, the economics of publishing could not tolerate such analytical spacing of every giant sentence. Sometimes, as here, English syntax will permit fairly close imitation of the structure of the sentence. If we want to spare our reader needless labor, however, it is usually best to spread such a sentence over more than one English sentence.
Blessed indeed—and rare—is the translation that seems totally free of the original syntax, that reads as if the work had been originally conceived in the language of the translation.
ON THEORETICAL LORE
Ambiguous words abound in Schoenberg's work. By that I mean words that resist quick interpretation and imitation, words that invite discussion. Many of them are key words of his vocabulary. If we can examine only one or two, we may as well start with his title: Harmonielehre. It is a common title. The German puts together two discrete words, Harmonie and Lehre, each an ancient word with a complex of meanings, and produces a third word, Harmonielehre. As Pavlov's bell set his dogs to salivating, so this title sets German musicians to recalling dominants, tonics, augmented-sixth chords, and all the other stuff that fills textbooks and academic courses on harmony. But the constituent words themselves, Harmonie and Lehre, are not so easily characterized.
If we limit the word "harmony" to its musical usage, we can glibly define it as "the study of chords." Schoenberg tries, more successfully than most, to hold it strictly to that: the traditional handling of chords, apart from all the other aspects of music, melodic, contrapuntal, timbral, and the like. Yet at the same time, even he—especially he—cannot ignore the melodic, the linear aspect of harmony. He cannot ignore the fact that melodic lines sounding simultaneously will create chords or, conversely that a series of chords can scarcely be realized musically without creating melodic lines. Furthermore, he cannot ignore the need for a cogent definition of "chord"; why, he asks, should a small group of sonorities, such as c-d-f-a, be recognized as "chords" while the multitude of others like c-e-g-d are not? "Harmony" is then in its musical usage a fairly unambiguous word only as long as we don't examine it very closely.
Lehre requires comment because of its general ambiguity, but particularly because we confuse it with Theorie. Schoenberg discusses "theory" at length and vigorously denies that his book is a "theory" of harmony. Lehre is the German twin of the English word "lore"; but where Lehre enjoys great academic and cultural responsibility, "lore" calls to mind folksy things such as the empirical knowledge and tall tales of unschooled fishermen or woodsmen. Just try translating Harmonielehre, Kompositionslehre, Formenlehre, Handwerkslehre, or die Lehre von den Brüchen as "harmonic lore," "the lore of musical composition," "formal lore," "the lore of handicraft," or "the lore of fractions." Rather quaint expressions, too quaint for up-to-date scholarly use. The academic connotation of "lore" is now classed as "archaic" by English dictionaries. Lehre, on the other hand, is quite current and may refer to just about anything that is taught: the opinions, facts, fictions, traditions, dogmas, theories, precepts, rules, science, system, and whatever else is taught by a master, by a school of thought, or concerning a particular subject. What English "equivalent" you choose for the word Lehre depends on its context and your own biases. In scientific and scholarly circles it is commonly translated as "theory."
Yet "theory" in our modern scientific age is far more rigorously defined than Lehre and, strictly speaking, would be only part of a Lehre. In its ancient Greek innocence, we are told, "theory" simply had to do with "looking" or "beholding," "spectacle" and "speculation." After the word had suffered a couple of millennia of use, Goethe's devil was moved to proclaim that "all theory is gray," that life is gloriously green, and that Faust should of course prefer life to theory. This reputation persists, especially among undergraduates, and above all among undergraduates in music. Evidently "theory" now has little to do with "looking" or with "spectacle," and it is certainly not fashionable to define "theory" as "speculation." However you define it, whether popularly or scientifically, "theory" stands at some remove from "practice," which means actually doing something—composing or playing music, for example. It is more popular, at least in music, to do something and leave "theory" to those who cannot. Or at least so Schoenberg characterized music "theory" as he found it in the first decades of this century, when he wrote his book: a hodgepodge of rules representing conventional practices and inflated by "theorists" into unsupportable dogmas and allegedly eternal, but actually outmoded laws. Schoenberg would respect music theory only if it were of the scientific sort, i.e., a set of descriptions, definitions, axioms, and hypotheses, rigorously systematic, that would try to explain the musical phenomena and perhaps provide a basis on which to predict future phenomena. But take care! Music theory should indeed explain, or try to explain; it should predict, if it can; but it should not ever prescribe. To Schoenberg, music theory, however rigorous, must tag along respectfully after practice, content to describe and explain—if it can—what the Artist-Composer has wrought. This personage, not the theorist, is competent to establish standards and innovate.
Schoenberg explicitly renounced all claim to writing a "theory," since he considered himself an artist rather than a theorist. Yet we nevertheless entitled this translation Theory of Harmony. We did so because of its speculative aspect, not because it gives a systematic, scientific theory. Besides, Schoenberg's Harmonielehre has long been known in English as his Theory of Harmony, and it seemed best to continue identifying it so.
Far more appropriate it would be, according to Schoenberg, to speak not of music "theory," but of a Darstellungssystem, a "presentational" or "representational system," or a "systematic presentation," of the normal usages extracted from musical works, usages precisely described and catalogued for the convenience of teachers and students. Why not stop pretending to teach "theory" of music, at least to undergraduates, and train them rather, as a carpenter trains his apprentices, in the craft of musical composition? Schoenberg admonishes us to train the student thoroughly in established materials, methods, and rules and let the student take it from there according to his own interests and talents. The new and uncatalogued could be of little use to the average student, whereas the unusually creative student, the future artist, will discover it for himself in his own way.
ON COGNATES AND JARGON
Since German and English are kin, there are many cognate words between them, both those of Germanic origin, such as Lehre and "lore," and those of Latin and Greek origin, such as Kadenz, Harmonie, Theorie, and Kosmos. Thus when there is a cognate, it will generally come to the translator without effort; in fact, the translator might inadvertently create one from time to time, a look-alike or sound-alike that ought to exist, which nonetheless a glance at the dictionary will eliminate as nonexistent. Even the cognate approved by the dictionary must be closely inspected to assure that its shades of meaning fit, or at least do not clash with, the context in which it is to appear. For no two words are likely to mean exactly the same, whether they are two different words in the same language or the same word in two different languages.
Kadenz is an example specific to the subject of harmony. Schoenberg devotes more than 20 pages to the question: "When, how, and why does a piece of music close (schliessen)?"—including detailed description of harmonic closing procedures and an exhaustive classification of harmonic cadences.10 His general word for "cadence," however, is Schluss (from schliessen), which we translate as "cadence" or "close" according to the context. His word Kadenz corresponds to the particular cadential formula we call the "authentic perfect cadence."
The cognate "clang," on the other hand, is virtually never to be used for Klang, certainly not in Schoenberg's work. Klang ordinarily includes consonant musical sounds, even the single tone with or without a number of partials, and is therefore quite at home in a textbook of harmony (especially in the compounds Einklang, Dreiklang, and Zusammenklang, the German words for "unison," "triad," and "chord" or "simultaneity"). There is no one English word that precisely corresponds to Klang. A "clanging" sound (we do not ordinarily say "a clang") is a strident ring or clatter of metal, seldom consonant, generally not very definite in pitch, and of rather limited use in the music whose harmony Schoenberg describes. Klang we then translate, according to the context, as "tone," "sonority," "chord," or simply "a musical sound" (not "noise").
The compound Zusammenklang is just as troublesome. "Chord" will often not do since it immediately calls to mind traditional clumps of tones that can be reduced to a few superposed thirds. For this limited meaning Schoenberg uses Akkord as well as Zusammenklang. But Zusammenklang embraces any simultaneous sounding whatsoever of any two, twelve, or thousand tones, creating any combination of intervals; and Schoenberg often uses the word in this sense as well. No doubt we have long needed a label in English for such a thing, at least from the early 1900s. "Sonority" might serve, emphasizing the sonorous blend of the tones; but "simultaneity," emphasizing rather their at-once-ness, is now fairly well established in music theory. It will apparently have to do, unless someone can find and win acceptance for something better. Yet "simultaneity" is a troublesome word. Its six syllables require a great deal of effort just to say and spell. More importantly, the word is a generalist, an abstract noun that wants to remain aloof from any particular instance of simultaneousness. "Sincerity" is a similarly abstract word, which so far has not suffered the humiliation of naming concrete instances: we do not yet proclaim that someone who has spoken sincerely has said a "sincerity." But to call a clot of tones that sound simultaneously "a simultaneity" (or "a sonority") is the same sort of usage. (In my translation of Schoenberg's work I did not translate Zusammenklang the same way each time but rather used various words and phrases according to the particular context, sometimes resorting indeed to the scholarly routine of apologetically including the German word in parentheses.)
This word Zusammenklang may serve as a reminder that the translator must sometimes confront technical expressions, jargon, where he must break new ground, where he must invent a name for something that was heretofore nameless in the language of the translation. It is often a difficult task, requiring insight into the matter to be named as well as imagination and linguistic virtuosity. The English-language jargon of psychoanalysis provides a great many famous examples, expressions such as "ego," "id," "identification," and "Oedipus complex," some of which have even entered the general vocabulary. We may sometimes forget that many of these expressions come not directly from Freud but from his translators. In the field of music an obvious example is our ungainly word "through-composed," an arrested translation of the German durchkomponiert. Indeed in the field of music we have special need of someone who will help take the drudgery out of our required professional reading; someone, that is, who can find lucid and idiomatic ways to express such things as "through-composed," "simultaneity," "tonicization process," "style-analytical procedures," and all the other half-translated expressions that we often use.
ON RESTING, RUSTING, AND OTHER MUSICAL FOIBLES
The particular metaphors or other sorts of comparisons an author chooses to convey his thought shape and color and permeate that thought. It is in fact often difficult to separate the thought from the metaphor. Whether they are separable or not, in translating we generally try to keep the thought and its original metaphor together. Schoenberg indeed asserts that if he "theorizes" he is "only presenting comparisons, . . . symbols . . . to connect ideas apparently remote from one another, to promote intelligibility. . . . "11 And comparisons are plentiful in his book, metaphors, for example, such as "vagrant" chords and "descending" progressions. Certain metaphors in fact recur, like motifs; "being underway," for example, "on the road" toward more comprehensive knowledge and exploitation of nature and sound; biological metaphors, in which Schoenberg (like Schenker and others) endows tones and tonal systems with characteristics of living things; and military and political metaphors, which he applies to the struggle for supremacy among tones.
The tonic is a monarch who must never relax his vigil over his territory, his tonality, and must frequently battle other would-be tonics and tonalities. Schoenberg envisions the possibility of musical territories where rival tonics and tonalities may harmoniously coexist, or even of democratic musical systems which dispense altogether with tonics or rulers.
Schoenberg mixes his metaphors quite freely. In one paragraph in the chapter on non-harmonic tones appear all three of those mentioned above, one after the other.12 The paragraph comes in the midst of his argument that the distinction between those relatively few combinations officially recognized as "chords" and all other "simultaneities" (such as those created by non-harmonic tones) has no convincing justification. Neither nature (the "overtone" series) nor the historical origin of the chords supports such a distinction. As for that historical origin—musicians had explored tones, had discovered some of their acoustical characteristics, and had imaginatively exploited these; that is to say, they had been "underway," advancing in the right direction. But then they devised systems, and with the establishment of the tempered system they stopped. They had agreed on a "cease fire," a "truce." "But they did not rest (rasten) in order to rearm and regroup (rüsten); they rested in order to rust (rosten)." The elements of the system took to "inbreeding" and "incest," spawning not new and vigorous ideas but offspring with all the defects of their fathers and mothers. Why this end of conquest, this truce, this settling down to incestuous enjoyment of modest successes? As if the definitive musical system had been found at last! Schoenberg could no longer tolerate the scandal; we are still far from identifying and solving "the problems that are contained in tones, . . . We must go ahead!"
So a good metaphor is a happy linguistic marriage between objects or ideas whose affinity for one another we did not suspect; and "word play," the writer's delight in manipulating the language itself, is a more or less happy marriage of a thought and the particular language. Word play thus heavily taxes the translator's ingenuity and resources. For the more intimate the union between the thought and the idiosyncracies of the particular language, the more it resists imitation in another language. This problem is perhaps more often and more easily soluble between English and German than it would be between less closely related languages.
Schoenberg's linguistic talent and his fondness for word play has been noted. The passage cited above contains various sorts of word play common in his work. The sentence with rasten, rüsten, and rosten illustrates the synthesis of the thought with words of similar sounds. Since German and English have many cognates, this word play could be successfully imitated, except for rüsten; but "rearm, "regroup," and the German words at least begin with the same letter. Play with the ambiguities, the different combinations of a word in the same context is of course another favorite device. In the passage cited, the word Weg (way, path, route) is used in expressions meaning "underway" and "on the right track." Idiomatic expression in the language of translation will often require that something of the word play, such as a repetition of the word in play, be "lost in translation." On the other hand, we can often easily repeat such words, as when Schoenberg concludes that once "they tempered the system . . . the system tempered the burning urgency to search."
If we have translated the recipe for a cake, or the manual for operating a machine, or instructions for writing a triad in four parts—i.e., if we were translating truly objective information—then we had only to set down the appropriate jargon in the proper order with the proper connectives. Nothing essential was lost in translation, so there is little else to say. However, if we have translated a panorama of a personality such as that of Schoenberg, rich in provocative ideas, vibrant with enticing ambiguities and implications, then we can go on and on pondering those ideas, those ambiguities and implications, and the experience of translating them. Thus the translator's dilemma turns into the translator's reward: the excitement of getting to know such a fertile text well enough to be able to "re-compose" it faithfully in another language. May the translation infect the reader with some of that same excitement. May the reader indeed receive a generous share of that reward. And may the bits that have been put in, the things that have been left out, the changes that have occurred on the way from German into English, be such that Schoenberg's "Americanised conscience" could still permit them.13
1Arnold Schoenberg, Letters, ed. Erwin Stein, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1965), p. 168.
2Idem, pp. 250-51.
3Jean Paris, "Translation and Creation," The Craft and Context of Translation, eds. William Arrowsmith and Roger Shattuck (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1961), p. 57.
4Schoenberg's was fin de siècle German. Mine is midtwentieth-century, southern and northeastern American. Yours is . . .
5Kenneth A. Telford, Aristotle's Poetics: Translation and Analysis (Chicago: Gateway Edition, 1961), p. x.
6Hector Berlioz, Evenings with the Orchestra, trans. and ed. Jacques Barzun (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1973), p. xvii.
7Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, trans. Roy E. Carter (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1978), p. 1. The sentence quoted opens his preface to the first edition, which was published in 1911. This, the first complete translation of Schoenberg's work, is based on his revised and enlarged addition of 1922, which of course also opens with the original preface.
8Idem, p. 325: "The laws native to the genius, however, are the laws of future generations." Cf. the seventh German edition, slightly revised by Josef Rufer (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1966 [date of Rufer's preface], which is the edition most likely available, p. 392: "Die Gesetze der Natur des genialen Menschen aber sind die Gesetze der zukünftigen Menschheit."
9Cf. Theory of Harmony, p. 138. This retranslation, done several years later without "peeking" at the published edition, is included to illustrate how the same translator may vary, if not his reading, at least his wording. The published version reads, "If we see that the dissonances hardly came about as our pedagogical method, for the sake of clear organization, presents them—namely, that yet another third was added above a triad—rather that they are probably notated contingencies of the melodic line, ornaments, then we shall understand that the other forms of resolution can also take place."
10Idem, pp. 125-45, 305-08.
11Idem, p. 11.
12Idem, p. 314. That passage in the text of the translation is the source of all the remaining quotations here.
13Many thanks to Professor Donald Thompson of the University of Puerto Rico; he encouraged me to write this piece, and his advice along the way has been invariably well-timed and well-aimed.