Style and Idea (Schoenberg)

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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.

Arnold Schoenberg Austrian-American composer

Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg was an Austrian-born American composer, music theorist, teacher, writer, and painter. He is widely considered one of the most important and 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. With the rise of the Nazi Party, Schoenberg's works were labeled degenerate music, because they were modernist and atonal. He emigrated to the United States in 1933.

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:

Dika Newlin American musician

Dika Newlin was a composer, pianist, professor, musicologist, and punk rock singer. She received a Ph.D from Columbia University at the age of 22. She was one of the last living students of Arnold Schoenberg, a Schoenberg scholar and a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond from 1978 to 2004. She performed as an Elvis impersonator and played punk rock while in her seventies in Richmond, Virginia.

  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.

Faber and Faber Limited, usually abbreviated to Faber, is an independent publishing house in London, the United Kingdom. Published authors and poets include T. S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, William Golding, Samuel Beckett, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon.

St. Martin's Press is a book publisher headquartered in Manhattan, New York City. St. Martin's Press is considered one of the largest English-language publishers bringing to the public some 700 titles a year under eight imprints.

Leonard David Stein was a musicologist, pianist, conductor, university teacher, and influential in promoting contemporary music on the American West Coast. He was for years Arnold Schoenberg's assistant, music director of the Schoenberg Institute at USC, and among the foremost authorities on Schoenberg's music. He was also an influential teacher in the lives of many younger composers, such as the influential minimalist La Monte Young.

The sections of the new version are:

  1. Editor's preface
  2. Translator's preface
  3. Personal Evaluation and Retrospect (14 items, c. 1923–1949)
  4. Modern Music (10 items, 1912–1949)
  5. Folk-Music and Nationalism (6 items, c. 1926–1947)
  6. Critics and Criticism (7 items, 1909–1923)
  7. Twelve-Tone Composition (6 items, 1923–c. 1948)
  8. Theory and Composition (13 items, 1922–c. 1948)
  9. Performance and Notation (18 items, 1923–1948)
  10. Teaching (8 items, 1911–1950)
  11. Composers (15 items, 1911–1951)
  12. Social and Political Matters (1912–1950)
  13. Sources and Notes
  14. Appendices
  15. Index

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

Related Research Articles

Alban Berg Austrian composer

Alban Maria Johannes Berg was an Austrian composer of the Second Viennese School. His compositional style combined Romantic lyricism with twelve-tone technique.

The Second Viennese School is the group of composers that comprised Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils and close associates in early 20th century Vienna, where he lived and taught, sporadically, between 1903 and 1925. Their music was initially characterized by late-Romantic expanded tonality and later, following Schoenberg's own evolution, a totally chromatic expressionism without firm tonal centre, often referred to as atonality; and later still, Schoenberg's serial twelve-tone technique. 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.

Twelve-tone technique musical composition method using all 12 chromatic scale notes equally often & not in a key

The twelve-tone technique—also known as dodecaphony, twelve-tone serialism, and twelve-note composition—is a method of musical composition first devised by Austrian composer Josef Matthias Hauer, who published his "law of the twelve tones" in 1919. In 1923, Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) developed his own, better-known version of 12-tone technique, which became associated with the "Second Viennese School" composers, who were the primary users of the technique in the first decades of its existence. The technique is a means of ensuring that all 12 notes of the chromatic scale are sounded as often as one another in a piece of music while preventing the emphasis of any one note through the use of tone rows, orderings of the 12 pitch classes. All 12 notes are thus given more or less equal importance, and the music avoids being in a key. Over time, the technique increased greatly in popularity and eventually became widely influential on 20th-century composers. Many important composers who had originally not subscribed to or even actively opposed the technique, such as Aaron Copland and Igor Stravinsky, eventually adopted it in their music.

Emancipation of the dissonance

The emancipation of the dissonance was a concept or goal put forth by composer Arnold Schoenberg and others, including his pupil Anton Webern. The phrase first appears in Schoenberg's 1926 essay "Opinion or Insight?". It may be described as a metanarrative to justify atonality. Jim Samson describes:

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.

Josef Matthias Hauer Austrian composer

Josef Matthias Hauer was an Austrian composer and music theorist. He is most famous for developing, independent of and a year or two before Arnold Schoenberg, a method for composing with all 12 notes of the chromatic scale. Hauer was also an important early theorist of twelve-tone music and composition.

<i>Lyric Suite</i> (Berg)

The Lyric Suite is a six-movement work for string quartet written by Alban Berg between 1925 and 1926 using methods derived from Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique. Though publicly dedicated to Alexander von Zemlinsky, the work has been shown to possess a "secret dedication" and to outline a "secret programme" Perle 1977a,.

Arnold Schoenberg's Piano Concerto, Op. 42 (1942) is one of his later works, written in America. It consists of four interconnected movements: Andante, Molto allegro, Adagio, and Giocoso. Around 20 minutes long, its first performance was given on February 6, 1944 at NBC Orchestra's Radio City Habitat in New York City, by Leopold Stokowski and the NBC Symphony Orchestra, with Eduard Steuermann at the piano. The first UK performance was on September 1945 at the BBC Proms with Kyla Greenbaum (piano) conducted by Basil Cameron.

René Leibowitz French composer and conductor

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<i>A Survivor from Warsaw</i> cantata by Arnold Schoenberg

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Die Reihe was a German-language music journal, edited by Herbert Eimert and Karlheinz Stockhausen and published by Universal Edition (Vienna) between 1955 and 1962. An English edition was published, under the original German title, between 1957 and 1968 by the Theodore Presser Company, in association with Universal Edition (London). A related book series titled Bücher der Reihe was begun, but only one title ever appeared in it, Herbert Eimert's Grundlagen der musikalischen Reihentechnik.

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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.
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