Arnold Schoenberg - Böcker

This treatise relates Schoenberg's concept of the musical idea. It defines his thought on gestalt, motive, grundgestalt, phrase, rhythm and accent, the construction function of harmony, homophonic and contrapuntal forms, and compositional coherence.

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.

The earlier chapters recapitulate in condensed form the principles laid down in his Theory of Harmony; the later chapters break entirely new ground, for they analyze the system of key relationships within the structure of whole movements and affirm the principle of "monotonality," showing how all modulations within a movement are merely deviations from, and not negations of, its main tonality.Schoenberg's argument is supported by music examples, which range from entire development sections of classical symphonies to analyses of the experimental harmonic progressions of Strauss, Debussy, Reger, and Schoenberg's own early music. The final chapter, "Apollonian Evaluation of a Dionysian Epoch," discusses the music of our time, with particular reference to the possibility of new methods of harmonic analysis.Structural Functions of Harmony is a standard work on its subject and provides an invaluable key to the development of musical structure during the last two hundred and fifty years. This new edition, with corrections, a new preface, and an index of subject headings, has been prepared under the editorial supervision of Leonard Stein.

For nearly a century, it has inspired composers, scholars, critics, performers, and visual artists.  Severine Neff re-creates for her readers the quartet's historical, cultural, and musical background–its introduction of the human voice, its genesis during a personal crisis in the composer's life, the scandal at its premiere, and its endlessly controversial reception, both critical and analytic.  This volume includes a newly edited, authoritative score of the quartet, as well as previously unavailable and newly translated texts by Grant Chorley."Indispensable for understanding one of the central compositions of the twentieth century."—Walter Frisch, Columbia University.

First published in 1948, Structural Functions of Harmony is Schoenberg's last theoretical work and contains his ultimate thoughts on classical and romantic harmony. The opening chapters are a resume of the basic principles of the early Theory of Harmony; the subsequent chapters demonstrate the concept of 'monotonality', whereby all modulations to different keys within a movement are analysed not in relation to each other but in terms of the irrelationship to one central tonality (tonic) as the centre of all harmonic change. Schoenberg's music examples range from the entire development sections of classical symphonies to analyses of the harmonic progressions of Strauss, Debussy, Reger, and his own early music.

Fundamentals of Musical Composition represents the culmination of more than forty years in Schoenberg's life devoted to the teaching of musical principles to students and composers in Europe and America. For his classes he developed a manner of presentation in which 'every technical matter is discussed in a very fundamental way, so that at the same time it is both simple and thorough'.This book can be used for analysis as well as for composition. On the one hand, it has the practical objective of introducing students to the process of composing in a systematic way, from the smallest to the largest forms; on the other hand, the author analyses in thorough detail and with numerous illustrations those particular sections in the works of the masters which relate to the compositional problem under discussion.