Schoenberg's Theory of Harmony--Help with Exercises?

[gifgaffegiraffe]

I've been working with Arnold Schoenberg's seminal "Theory of Harmony" text on my own, not with a teacher--I'm basically working towards an apprenticeship but the composer wants me to finish this first; having been self-taught, I have a spotty knowledge of theory. This is actually my second time reading it, I had foolishly neglected to do the exercises on my first go round and now I'm doing them studiously (and, unsurprisingly, understanding and retaining things much better).

For those of you who know the text I'm in Chapter 7: Directions for Better Progressions. He's finally teaching form, having you write with consideration to the root progressions, rather than just working out a voice leading difficulty. I'm pretty sure I understand the concept of ascending and descending progressions ("ascending" would be the rising of tension--though not necessarily through dissonance--while descending progressions lead to cadences; I'm basically operating under the assumption that you should only approach III and V with the "ascending intervals" he defines, approach other chords either with ascending or descending intervals, and then only use descending intervals on descending progressions i.e. the cadence. Please correct me if I'm wrong here), but I'm having issues setting up the exercises.

I know that now, inversions and sevenths are used to create more variety and a better bass, but I'm finding it takes me a remarkable amount of time just to select chords (actually connecting them takes little time because I did an insane amount of voice leading practice, and I've no problems with parallels and the like). I'm not entirely sure if I should just pick chords with consideration only to the root progressions, not worrying about inversions or sevenths until I start putting together a bass line (which I do next), or what the best order of operations is here. Schoenberg does specify that right now, it's best to do everything systematically. Should I start from the beginning or work my way out from the middle, as he has you do in the previous chapter? And what of the minor mode--how can I go about planning the pivot tones now that I have all these considerations?

As you can see, I'm confused. I understand all the concepts, but I'm a little hazy on how to put them together. Could anybody give me a hand? I'd also appreciate any advice for anything that's up ahead in the book.

Sorry for my abuse of parenthetical, I don't really have any time to edit this...

[theholygideons]

I'm not sure what the deal is about. When I got to that chapter of theory of harmony, I didn't take the ascending/descending progression notions too seriously. As long you don't do anything too repetitively, e.g. use too many descending progressions consecutively, then I don't see why you would spend so much time figuring out chords. I'm a novice, but that's my opinion. lol

I'm up to the part on modulations, and his way of writing just makes everything confusing as hell...