Schillinger is sometimes criticized on the basis that his system reduces everything to mathematics and that musical intuition and the subjective side of creativity are neglected. I have never been able to understand this criticism. The currently taught rules of harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration certainly do not suggest to the student materials adapted to his own expressive desires. Instead he is given a small and circumscribed set of materials, already much used, together with a set of prohibitions to apply to them, and then he is asked to express himself only within these limitations. It has been the constant complaint from students of composition that their teachers fail to make clear the distinction between the objective and subjective factors in music. A young composer is constrained, as things are now, to spend several years following rules deduced or assumed from the works of his predecessors, but as soon as his works begin to be heard he is reproached, and rightly so, if they sound like somebody else’s. He has not been shown what possibilities there really are in music in any objective, scientific way, nor has he been trained in the manner best calculated to develop an original talent, by exercising his own taste and judgment in choosing from among those possibilities the materials best suited to his musical intention.

Henry Cowell