Schoenberg's Twelve-Tone Music
Symmetry and the Musical Idea

Jack Boss presents detailed analyses of Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone pieces, bringing the composer's 'musical idea' - problem, elaboration, solution - to life.

Jack Boss (Author)

9781107046863, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 2 October 2014

463 pages, 221 music examples
25.2 x 19.5 x 2.7 cm, 1.2 kg

'Boss's groundbreaking book provides a new and illuminating methodology for understanding, exploring, and appreciating Schoenberg's music.' Joe Argentino, Music Theory Online

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.

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, #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, mvt. 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 communicating with God using word or image
8. String Trio, Op. 45: a musical idea (and a near-death experience) is expressed as a conflict between alternative row forms.

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