Schoenberg's Twelve-Tone Music

Symmetry and the Musical Idea

Jack Boss

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781107046863
• eBook ISBN:
  9781139699242
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

Jack Boss takes a unique approach to analyzing Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone music, adapting the composer's notion of a 'musical idea' - problem, elaboration, solution - as a framework and focusing on the large-scale coherence of the whole piece. The book begins by defining 'musical idea' as a large, overarching process involving conflict between musical elements or situations, elaboration of that conflict, and resolution, and examines how such conflicts often involve symmetrical pitch and interval shapes that are obscured in some way. Containing close analytical readings of a large number of Schoenberg's key twelve-tone works, including Moses und Aron, the Suite for Piano Op. 25, the Fourth Quartet, and the String Trio, the study provides the reader with a clearer understanding of this still-controversial, challenging, but vitally important modernist composer.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Series information
• Title page
• Copyright information
• Dedication
• Table of contents
• List of music examples
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations and notational conventions
• 1 Musical idea and symmetrical ideal
• 2 Suite for Piano Op. 25: varieties of Idea in Schoenberg's earliest twelve-tone music
• 3 Woodwind Quintet Op. 26: the twelve-tone Idea reanimates a large musical form
• 4 Three Satires Op. 28, No. 3: The earliest example of the "symmetrical ideal" in a (more or less) completely combinatorial context
• 5 Piano Piece Op. 33a: The "symmetrical ideal" conflicts with and is reconciled to row order
• 6 Fourth String Quartet Op. 37, movement I: two motives give rise to contrasting row forms, meters, textures, and tonalities (and are reconciled) within a large sonata form
• 7 Moses und Aron: an incomplete musical idea represents an unresolved conflict between using word and image to communicate God
• 8 String Trio Op. 45: a musical idea and a near-death experience are expressed as a conflict between alternative row forms
• Bibliography
• Index