Full Description
Winner of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award in Concert Music Books
Proposing that Arnold Schoenberg has been more discussed than heard, more tolerated than loved, Allen Shawn puts aside ultimate judgments about Schoenberg's place in music history to explore the composer's fascinating world in a series of linked essays—"soundings"—that are both searching and wonderfully suggestive. Approaching Schoenberg primarily from the listener's point of view, Shawn plunges into the details of some of Schoenberg's works while at the same time providing a broad overview of his involvements in music, painting, and the history through which he lived.
Contents
Foreword Introduction: Six Little Piano Pieces BRIDGE PASSAGE, 1874-1908 1. First Loves 2. Transfigured Night 3. Dawn: The Gurre-Lieder 4. Berlin Cabaret 5. Coming Apart 6. An Inner Compulsion A NEW FORM OF EXPRESSION, 1909-13 7. Farben 8. Listening to Five Pieces for Orchestra 9. Paths to (and in) Erwartung 10. Wrong Notes 11. Six Little Pieces 12. Theory of Harmony 13. Pierrot 14. Die gluckliche Hand SILENCE, ORDER, AND TERROR, 1914-33 15. Incident at Mattsee 16. Critics and Disciples 17. A Clearing in the Forest: Twelve-Tone Music 18. Satires 19. Catastrophe 20. Moses and Arnold AMERICA, 1933-51 21. Exodus 22. 1940: Stravinsky and Schoenberg 23. Games 24. On Being Short 25. Piano Concerto 26. Death and Rebirth 27. Seventy-fifth Birthday AFTERLIFE 28. Death and Rebirth II 29. Writings about Schoenberg 30. Last Notes: Portrait in Retrograde Suggested Readings Notes Acknowledgments Index
