Description
Book SynopsisProposing 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 essayssoundingsthat are both searching and wonderfully suggestive.
Trade ReviewA collection of elegant and persuasive essays: analytic discussions of single works and vivid accounts of phases and facets of Schoenberg’s life...Shawn is an engaging writer. -- Anthony Tommasini * New York Times *
One of the best things to have happened to the composer in a long time. Allen Shawn, a composer himself, is an admirer of Schoenberg. He gives us the whole man seen from within his cultural environment and from within his music too...Shawn invites us to share with him a spontaneous and warm response to Schoenberg’s music rather than a purely analytical one...Shawn is exceptionally felicitous at finding words for music, which makes him an ideal companion on this journey of discovery. -- George Perle * Wall Street Journal *
Nothing in recent years has filled me with an urgent desire to re-engage with [Schoenberg’s music] so much as this sensitive and personal book. -- Bayan Northcott * BBC Music Magazine *
Table of ContentsForeword 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
