Ethan Haimo – författare

Early in his career, the composer Arnold Schoenberg maintained correspondence with many notable figures: Gustav Mahler, Heinrich Schenker, Guido Adler, Arnold Rosé, Richard Strauss, Alexander Zemlinsky, and Anton von Webern, to name a few. In this volume of Oxford's Schoenberg in Words series, Ethan Haimo and Sabine Feisst present English translations of the entirety of Arnold Schoenberg's early correspondence, from the earliest extant letters in 1891 to those written in the aftermath of the controversial premieres of his String Quartet No. 1, Op. 7, and the Kammersymphonie, Op. 9. The letters provide a wealth of information on many of the crucial stages in Schoenberg's early career, offering invaluable insights into his daily life and working habits. New details emerge about his activities at Wolzogen's Buntes Theater in Berlin, his frequently confrontational interactions with his first publisher (Dreililien Verlag), the reactions of friends and critics to the premieres of his works, his role in the founding of the Vereinigung schaffender Tonkünstler, his activities as a teacher, and his (all too often unsuccessful) attempts to convince musicians to perform his music. Presented alongside the editors' extensive running commentary, the more than 300 letters in this volume create a vivid picture of the young Schoenberg and his times.

More than sixty years have passed since Arnold Schoenberg revealed the new method of twelve-tone composition which was to establish his position as a revolutionary. Far from being restrictive, the 12-tone method inspired Schoenberg to compose some of his most enduring masterpieces. Furthermore it has proved to be one of the most influential ideas in the history of music. Even Stravinsky, his former rival and regarded by many as the antithesis of serialism, astounded the musical world by adopting the method in his own works in the 1950s. In spite of the central importance of Schoenberg's ideas, relatively little has been written until now about the evolution of his method and the refinement of his technique. Haimo explores this aspect, drawing on Schoenberg's papers, sketches, and manuscripts as well as published scores. The book traces the development of his form from its rudimentary beginnings in 1914 to the highly refined works of his mature 12-tone period, revealing that through his merciless self-criticism the composer systematically sought ways to transform his idea until it embraced the motives, phrases, harmony, melody, and metre, developing variation and form of his music.This study should be of interest to music analysts and theorists, musicologists and students of 20th-century music.

Haydn never discussed his compositional ideas in much detail, either in the interviews he gave to an early biographer or in his surviving correspondence. Moreover, relatively few sketches of his compositions have been preserved. Therefore, attempts to reconstruct Haydn's compositional thought, and in particular his formal logic, must rely on evidence drawn from close analyses of the works themselves. Using his symphonies as its subject, this book attempts to clarify what Haydn's fundamental principles of formal logic might have been. It shows how Haydn employed those basic compositional principles to structure his forms, providing explanations that account for specific details of individual movements as well as the relationships between the movements. Beyond what they show about Haydn's formal thought and the individual works discussed, the analyses in this book also have a larger purpose: to argue in support of the idea that compositions cannot be analysed in a meaningful manner if the analysis is divorced from the work's historical context.

Arnold Schoenberg is widely regarded as one of the most significant and innovative composers of the twentieth century. It is commonly assumed that Schoenberg's music divides into three periods: tonal, atonal, and serial. It is also assumed that Schoenberg's atonal music made a revolutionary break with the past, particularly in terms of harmonic structure. This book challenges both these popular notions. Haimo argues that Schoenberg's 'atonal' music does not constitute a distinct unified period. He demonstrates that much of the music commonly described as 'atonal' did not make a complete break with prior practices, even in the harmonic realm, but instead transformed the past by a series of incremental changes. An important and influential contribution to the field, Haimo's findings help not only to re-evaluate Schoenberg, but also to re-date much of what has been defined as one of the most crucial turning points in music history.