Schoenberg's Twelve-Tone Music: Symmetry and the Musical Idea (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781107624924)

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.

Author: Jack Boss
ISBN-10: 1107624924
ISBN-13: 9781107624924
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Language: English
Published: 07/28/2016
Pages: 466
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.62lbs
Size: 9.61h x 6.69w x 0.94d