Intellect-Emotion

This is another dichotomy that is in evidence in the XXI century.  While music during the Romantic era tried to appeal to our emotions and to make us feel our humanity, music became more interested in appealing to the intellect in the XX century. Schoenberg and his music based on numerical sequences was trying to develop a system that would make people listen to his sequences of pitches in a different way than they were used to, guided by a concept of series of numbers, trying to follow that sequence of numbers throughout a piece, regardless of  past usage of thos pitches or of conventions. This, I think, was an attempt of breaking our emotional bonds with the musical structures of the past through the use of our intellect. I think Schoenberg might have been trying to develop different conventions and have certain series of notes mean something emotionally different that they had meant up to that point. However,  I think that the effort, in general, failed. That type of music has not changed popular music to any marked degree. Maybe it has expanded the chords that one can use. Maybe it has allowed us to envision a different music but we are still in a tonal universe, where major and minor scales are used all the time. Which leads me to another dichotomy: