At the beginning of the twenty-first century, [Arnold] Schoenberg’s music no longer sounds so alien. It has radiated outward in unpredictable ways, finding alternative destinies in bebop jazz (the glassy chords of Thelonious Monk have a Schoenbergian tinge) and on movie soundtracks (horror movies need atonality as they need shadows on the walls of alleys). With the modernist revolution spintered into many factions, with composers gravitating back to tonality or moving on to something else, Schoenberg’s music no longer carries the threat that all music will sound like this. Still, it retains its Faustian aura. These intervals will always shake the air; they will never become second nature. That is at once their power and their fate.
—Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, ch. 2, “Doctor Faust”
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theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks