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The pervasive influence of numerology on Arnold Schoenberg's private life is a matter of record. But might his curious faith in the power of numbers have influenced his art as well? The author proposes that indeed it did, and that all of the music of Schoenberg, in all of its aspects, was consciously and deliberately organized by the composer according to the procedures of traditional numerology. ... Read more

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In this thought provoking study, Silvina Milstein proposes a reconstruction of Schoenberg's conception of compositional process in his twelve-tone works, which challenges the prevalent view that this music is to be appropriately understood exclusively in terms of the new method. Her claim that in Scoenberg we encounter hierarchical pitch relations operating in a twelve-tone context is supported by in-depth musical analysis and the commentary on the sketch material, which shows tonal considerations to be a primary concern and even an important criterion in the composition of the set itself. The core of the book consists of detailed analytical studies; yet its heavy reliance on factors outside the score places this work beyond the boundaries of textual analysis into the field of this history of musical ideas. ... Read more

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This trilingual book contains the contributions to the international conference at Leuven in October 2002, which reunited a dozen specialists on the musico-literary subject Pierrot Lunaire. Result of an interdisciplinary research project, this conference joined the most recent musicological and literary research on this topic, in order to take stock and compare results. Focused on the different, literary as well as musical, transformations of this work-from Albert Giraud's collection of verse, to the German translation by Otto Erich Hartleben, the musical composition by Arnold Schoenberg, and the re-translation into French-the discussion also includes the cultural and historical background that interacts with and partially explains these mutations. Special attention is paid to contemporary public reception of the different stages of this work. ... Read more

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Between 1908 and 1923, Arnold Schoenberg began writing music that went against many of the accepted concepts and practices of this art. Largely following his intuition during these years, he composed some of the masterpieces of the modern repertoire--including Pierrot lunaire and Erwartung--works that have since provoked a large, though fragmented, body of critical and analytical writing. In this book, Bryan Simms combines a historical study with a close analytical reading of the music to give us a new and richer understanding of Schoenberg's seminal work during this period. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Deft, even-handed, smart.
Locating a genesis of atonality
In the introduction and first chapter of The Atonal Music of Arnold Schoenberg, 1908-1923, Bryan Simms shows us that Schoenberg's creative development unfolds a series of tight correspondences between composition and academic theory: theoretical assertions closely mirror his changing compositional approaches, in what appears to be a radical ambivalence. From early in his career, what Schoenberg writes about music seems to apply to his compositions from around the same time, but not as easily to his earlier or later work. More than just loose aesthetic parallels, the connections suggest a composer dominated by an urgently evolving, yet highly isolated, internal thought process. Simms does acknowledge explanations, from Adorno and others, that Schoenberg's revolution is part of a "resounding echo of...social antinomies",but he then turns our attention productively toward the tendencies of Schoenberg the individual.

Simms supports this overall impression with evidence from the Harmonielehre (1911), echoing Ethan Haimo's apt hypothesis that "it is in Schoenberg's conception of tonality that the most useful clues for the origins of atonality can be found."Even more than Haimo, Simms carefully interprets the composer's views on harmony, and connects them to specific compositional tendencies. In pedagogical examples of harmonic progressions, we find a "defective theory" that favors interchangeable 'successions', sometimes at the expense of determinate, cadence-directed progressions ; Schoenberg regards "vagrant chords" (including fairly conventional chromatic harmony) as fragmented suspensions of tonal thinking, rather than subordinate participants in a tonal structure.(Tangent: Haimo's analyses of the Opus 6 songs and the Opus 7 string quartet likewise reveal a composer uniquely predisposed against "progression"--against structurally functional, integrated tonal unity. For Haimo, these predispositions are part academic eccentricity, and part personal manifesto--Schoenberg's evolution, he concludes, is "not so much the product of anonymous historical forces as it was the specific notion of a single thinker.")

Both scholars also find fault in Schoenberg's understanding of tonal progression. In contrast to Haimo, Simms is more concerned with complex interplays of influence, but while Schoenberg's shift away from key was "a symptom of a larger historical evolution,"he asserts that without the specificity of Schoenberg's tendencies after 1908, atonality as we now understand it through Webern, Messiaen, Boulez, and others, would be impossible.

Both scholars offer much more to the conversation than what these summaries suggest, but from these isolated points, we can gather a distinctive sensibility about innovation in music history: that composers' beliefs about music are an impetus behind their practices, and those practices, if successful, bring about a larger set of shared beliefs--in this case, our social history of atonality--beliefs that might have gone another direction. The epistemology of this view is elaborate: Simms really cares about the chronology of Schoenberg's writing, and brings the implications of that chronology to the foreground.

But this line of argumentation may be deceptively efficacious, drawing clarity from an orderly timeline, at the expense of a broader, but less explicit, genealogy of aesthetics and musical practice. We should consider that practices, like dissonance treatment and the assembly of chord progressions, make for an easier taxonomy than the ideas and social forces that they accompany. Once we identify, for example, the practical difference between the inchoate harmonic 'successions' found in the Harmonielehre, and the more directed progressions underlying Schenker's (1910) Kontrapunkt, the notion of opposition between them seems to help distinguish between subtler categories of desire, aesthetics, and ideology, among artists and audiences (even if what really motivates compositional practices like "atonality" is more complex). In Haimo's case, we are even able to localize the origin of a tradition, so that we might wonder whether "without Arnold Schoenberg, we would have seen the emergence of music that we would define as atonal,"implying that only Schoenberg's idea of tonal harmony could generate the practice of atonality that Schoenberg and his circle--widening throughout the 20th century--initiated. That atonality would have been different without Schoenberg is clear enough. But what of the divergent social and intellectual contexts in which Schoenbergian atonality has resonated, without Schoenberg's help? And what of musical practices that might undergo socially driven recombinations throughout music history, regardless of their origins?

Come out in paperback, .....!
Certainly the most serious, scholarly, and musicological study of Schoenberg's early, atonal work.For those interested in less of an introduction and more in depth analysis, this book is the key for its subject area.Lucidly written, the ideal first step beyond so many biographical-introductions to this great composer. ... Read more

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The Musical Idea is one of the most important documents in 20th-century musical thought. The Gedanke manuscripts, from which The Musical Idea is compiled, are legendary writings of Arnold Schoenberg. Central to his concern was his concept of the "musical idea," which represents the wholeness of the musical work and embraces Schoenberg’s notions of motive, gestalt, phrase, theme, rhythm, harmony, and form. Ultimately, the musical idea is the vision of the composer by which a musical work achieves unity in relation to the means by which the work is comprehended in its unity by the listener. ... Read more

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Analytical and historical studies of the twentieth century's most influential musical figures, by Milton Babbitt, Arthur Berger, Edward T. Cone, Robert Craft, Claudio Spies, and others. ... Read more

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This sheet music was newly engraved from early and authoritative editions. ... Read more

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