Music: Calf with Six Feet

Chicagoans have endured—and some have even enjoyed—some strange music recently. They have heard the sounds that Milhaud and Hindemith make, and last week they listened to the weirdest of all, the dissonant music of Austrian Arnold Schönberg, the father of atonality. The Pro Arte String Quartet worked its way through the composer's cacophonous String Quartet No. 3 and then played his familiar Transfigured Night, which he wrote in 1899, before he ran off the melodic rails. When Quartet No. 3 was over, the loudest applause came from the sixth row, where lively, gnomelike Schönberg, natty in a polka-dot bow tie, sat...