Style and Idea

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First edition
(publ. Philosophical Library, 1950) StyleAndIdea.jpg
First edition
(publ. Philosophical Library, 1950)

Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg (in German: Stil und Gedanke) is the name for a published collection of essays, articles and sketches by Arnold Schoenberg, that has appeared in various forms.

The earliest may date to c. 1950 [1] (just before his death), edited and translated by Dika Newlin, and contains fifteen essays, published by Philosophical Library, New York:

  1. The relationship to the text (1912)
  2. Gustav Mahler (1912, 1948)
  3. New music, outmoded music, style and idea (1946)
  4. Brahms the progressive (1933 radio talk, revised 1947 as an essay)
  5. Composition with twelve tones (1941 and c. 1948)
  6. A dangerous game (1944?)
  7. Eartraining through composing (1939)
  8. Heart and brain in music (1946)
  9. Criteria for the evaluation of music (1946)
  10. Folkloristic symphonies (1947)
  11. Human rights (1947)
  12. On revient toujours (1948)
  13. The blessing of the dressing (1948)
  14. This is my fault (1949)
  15. To the wharfs.

(Dates from the table of contents, sources and notes to the 1975 edition.) A Spanish translation was published by Taurus of Madrid in 1951. [2]

The 1975 edition [3] first published (according to an inner page) by Faber and Faber, published in the United States by Belmont Music Publishers [4] and by St. Martin's Press the same year 1975, [5] was twice as long (559 pp. as against 224 for the first version), contained 94 selections of varying lengths in 10 themed sections (including most of the above, dividing "Composition with twelve tones" into two parts) in translations by Leo Black, edited by Leonard Stein (though Dika Newlin is still credited for the translations of the twelve items above) - "A Dangerous Game" and "To the Wharfs" were dropped between versions.

The sections of the new version are:

  1. Editor's preface
  2. Translator's preface
  3. Personal Evaluation and Retrospect (14 items, c. 19231949)
  4. Modern Music (10 items, 19121949)
  5. Folk-Music and Nationalism (6 items, c. 19261947)
  6. Critics and Criticism (7 items, 19091923)
  7. Twelve-Tone Composition (6 items, 1923c. 1948)
  8. Theory and Composition (13 items, 1922c. 1948)
  9. Performance and Notation (18 items, 19231948)
  10. Teaching (8 items, 19111950)
  11. Composers (15 items, 19111951)
  12. Social and Political Matters (19121950)
  13. Sources and Notes
  14. Appendices
  15. Index

The Philosophical Library reprinted the 14-item 1950 edition in 2010. [6]

Related Research Articles

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Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg was an Austrian-American composer, music theorist, teacher, writer, and painter. He is widely considered one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School. As a Jewish composer, Schoenberg was targeted by the Nazi Party, which labeled his works as degenerate music and forbade them from being published. He emigrated to the United States in 1933, becoming an American citizen in 1941.

The Second Viennese School was the group of composers that comprised Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils, particularly Alban Berg and Anton Webern, and close associates in early 20th-century Vienna. Their music was initially characterized by late-Romantic expanded tonality and later, a totally chromatic expressionism without firm tonal centre, often referred to as atonality; and later still, Schoenberg's serial twelve-tone technique. Adorno said that the twelve-tone method, when it had evolved into maturity, was a "veritable message in a bottle", addressed to an unknown and uncertain future. Though this common development took place, it neither followed a common time-line nor a cooperative path. Likewise, it was not a direct result of Schoenberg's teaching—which, as his various published textbooks demonstrate, was highly traditional and conservative. Schoenberg's textbooks also reveal that the Second Viennese School spawned not from the development of his serial method, but rather from the influence of his creative example.

In music, serialism is a method of composition using series of pitches, rhythms, dynamics, timbres or other musical elements. Serialism began primarily with Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, though some of his contemporaries were also working to establish serialism as a form of post-tonal thinking. Twelve-tone technique orders the twelve notes of the chromatic scale, forming a row or series and providing a unifying basis for a composition's melody, harmony, structural progressions, and variations. Other types of serialism also work with sets, collections of objects, but not necessarily with fixed-order series, and extend the technique to other musical dimensions, such as duration, dynamics, and timbre.

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As the ear becomes acclimatized to a sonority within a particular context, the sonority will gradually become 'emancipated' from that context and seek a new one. The emancipation of the dominant-quality dissonances has followed this pattern, with the dominant seventh developing in status from a contrapuntal note in the sixteenth century to a quasi-consonant harmonic note in the early nineteenth. By the later nineteenth century the higher numbered dominant-quality dissonances had also achieved harmonic status, with resolution delayed or omitted completely. The greater autonomy of the dominant-quality dissonance contributed significantly to the weakening of traditional tonal function within a purely diatonic context.

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References

  1. OCLC   528460. Schoenberg.at gives 1950 ; libraries give c. 1950.
  2. OCLC   840792
  3. OCLC   751304009
  4. Belmont a regular Schoenberg publisher, but then Belmont = beautiful mountain = Schoenberg, yes?
  5. OCLC   1543041
  6. "Reprint of "Style and Idea" (1950) published". 27 May 2010. Retrieved January 23, 2013.