Schoenberg's Atonal Music
Musical Idea, Basic Image, and Specters of Tonal Function

Portrays Schoenberg's atonal music as successions of motives and pitch-class sets that flesh out 'musical idea' and 'basic image' frameworks.

Jack Boss (Author)

9781108409933, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 12 August 2021

405 pages, 132 music examples
24.4 x 16.9 x 2.2 cm, 0.7 kg

'Jack Boss' book, Schoenberg's Atonal Music, presents a unified, integrated, and consistent picture of the composer's middle period compositional processes and works in contrast to the dichotomies of tonal versus atonal, atonal versus serial, and intuitive verses rational composer found in much Schoenberg scholarship. Boss creates an analytical model that links Schoenberg's tonal, atonal, and serial compositions, demonstrates the processes found in his tonal works continue albeit transformed by new structural resources in the atonal works, and demonstrates the organicism and applicability of pitch-class set analysis as a consequence of Schoenberg's method of working with and transforming small intervallic patterns.' Ciro Scotto, Ohio University

Award-winning author Jack Boss returns with the 'prequel' to Schoenberg's Twelve-Tone Music (Cambridge, 2014) demonstrating that the term 'atonal' is meaningful in describing Schoenberg's music from 1908 to 1921. This book shows how Schoenberg's atonal music can be understood in terms of successions of pitch and rhythmic motives and pitch-class sets that flesh out the large frameworks of 'musical idea' and 'basic image'. It also explains how tonality, after losing its structural role in Schoenberg's music after 1908, begins to re-appear not long after as an occasional expressive device. Like its predecessor, Schoenberg's Atonal Music contains close readings of representative works, including the Op. 11 and Op. 19 Piano Pieces, the Op. 15 George-Lieder, the monodrama Erwartung, and Pierrot lunaire. These analyses are illustrated by richly detailed musical examples, revealing the underlying logic of some of Schoenberg's most difficult pieces of music.

1. Tonal oder Atonal? The complicated, contradictory nature of Schoenberg's middle-period music (Op. 11, No. 1)
2. Piano pieces Op. 11, Nos. 2 and 3: The latter movements of a remarkably progressive cycle
3. Das Buch der hängenden Gärten, Op. 15, Nos. 7 and 11: basic images in two of the earliest atonal pieces
4. Erwartung, Op. 17: A Leitmotivic Opera and a 'cumulative setting', atomized
5. Six little piano pieces, Op. 19 (Nos. 2, 3, and 6): musical idea and basic image in miniature
6. Pierrot lunaire, Op. 21, Nos. 1, 14 and 21: basic image at the apex of its development
7. Summary, and the way forward to twelve-tone music.

Subject Areas: Individual composers & musicians, specific bands & groups [AVH], 20th century & contemporary classical music [AVGC6], Music reviews & criticism [AVC], Theory of music & musicology [AVA]