From my read of "Theory of Harmony" and "Structural Functions of Harmony", it seems to me Schoenberg definitely wasn't aiming to be a great innovator, he was de

From my read of "Theory of Harmony" and "Structural Functions of Harmony", it seems to me Schoenberg definitely wasn't aiming to be a great innovator, he was desperate to be part of the great tradition and saw serialism as an inevitable consequence of the way in which tonality was being stretched further and further in particular by Wagner and Schoenberg's great hero, Mahler. Schoenberg came up with the idea of serialism because he felt there needed to be some sort of formal constraint to give structure to the music in the absence of harmony because he felt the sense of a tonic was being stretched to breaking point anyway and would inevitably fail. People came up with other ways to provide this structure once the whole serialist -> integral serialist process had worked its way through. Saying there's nothing you can't do in serialism you can't do in free atonality seems unfair. Firstly free atonality came about after integral serialism. Secondly, there's nothing you can do in any type of musical composition that you can't do in free atonality, so you may as well say all the things you can do with functional harmony are a worthless constraint. As for popularity - I personally don't think that's an important characteristic at all, but if you do, there are lots of serialist works that are very popular (eg Wozzeck[1]). [1] And I deliberately chose that one rather than say Berg's violin concerto which is also very popular because that's one of the ones that you're accusing of mining serialism for tonal elements