Coherence, Counterpoint, Instrumentation, Instruction in Form

by Arnold Schoenberg, Severine Neff (Introduction), Charlotte Cross (Translation)

Only Stravinsky can claim as much credit as Schoenberg for the most dramatic innovations in twentieth-century music. Inventor of the twelve-tone row, explorer of atonality and the hexachord, composer of tone poems, songs, and chamber music, and chief spokesman for the Vienna Circle, Schoenberg has become ever more influential as his successors have come to understand him.

 

Fuller understanding has been delayed because many of his writings have not yet been edited or published. This volume collects four short works, each concentrated on a key issue in composition. Written in 1917, but altered and augmented many times in later years, the manuscripts edited and translated in this volume have never been published before.

 

Their importance can permit no further delay since they present Schoenberg's thinking well after the publication in 1911 of Harmonielehre , his revolutionary theoretical book. The later texts provide numerous prospects for enhancing the study and appreciation of Schoenberg's compositions and theories.

 

Also a painter, Schoenberg enjoyed the friendship of Kandinsky and the Berlin expressionists. This volume includes a frontispiece reproducing one of Schoenberg's paintings.

Genres: Music

135 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1993

About the author

Noted Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg abandoned tradition and developed the twelve-tone system for music.

Associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, he led the second Viennese school. He used the spelling Schönberg until his move to the United States in 1934, whereupon he altered it to Schoenberg "in deference to American practice."

His approach in terms of harmony developed among the major landmarks of 20th-century thought; at least three generations in the Europeans and Americans consciously extended his thinking or in some cases passionately reacted in opposition. During the rise of the Nazi party, people labeled jazz as degenerate art.

People widely knew Schoenberg early in his career for his success in simultaneously extending the opposed German romantic styles of Johannes Brahms and Richard Wagner. Later, his name came to personify pioneering innovations, the most polemical feature of 20th-century art. In the 1920s, the technique, a widely influential method of Schoenberg, manipulated an ordered series of all in the chromatic scale. He also coined the term variation, and this first modern embraced ways of motifs without resorting to the dominance of a centralized melodic idea.

Schoenberg, an important theorist, also painted and influentially taught his students, who included Alban Berg, Anton Friedrich Wilheim von Webern, Hanns Eisler, Egon Wellesz, and later John Milton Cage, Lou Harrison, Earl Kim, and many other prominent. Avant-garde thought throughout the 20th century echoes many of practices, including the formalization of method and his habit of openly inviting audiences to think analytically. His crucial, often polemical views of history and aesthetics influenced many significant critics, including Theodor Adorno, Charles Rosen, and Carl Dahlhaus,of the 20th century. His thought also considerably influenced the pianists Rudolf Serkin, Artur Schnabel, Eduard Steuermann, and later Glenn Gould.

The Arnold Schönberg center in Vienna collects his archival legacy.