Schoenberg Why He Matters
Download Schoenberg Why He Matters PDF/ePub or read online books in Mobi eBooks. Click Download or Read Online button to get Schoenberg Why He Matters book now. This website allows unlimited access to, at the time of writing, more than 1.5 million titles, including hundreds of thousands of titles in various foreign languages.
Schoenberg: Why He Matters
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2023 A New Yorker Best Book of the Year “[A]n immensely valuable source for anyone desiring an accessible overview of this endlessly controversial and chronically misunderstood giant of 20th-century music.” —John Adams, New York Times Book Review, cover review An astonishingly lyrical biography that rescues Schoenberg from notoriety, restoring him to his rightful place in the pantheon of twentieth-century composers. In his time, the Austrian American composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) was an international icon. His twelve-tone system was considered the future of music itself. Today, however, leading orchestras rarely play his works, and his name is met with apathy, if not antipathy. With this interpretative account, the acclaimed biographer of Toscanini finally restores Schoenberg to his rightful place in the canon, revealing him as one of the twentieth century’s most influential composers and teachers. Sachs shows how Schoenberg, a thorny character who composed thorny works, raged against the “Procrustean bed” of tradition. Defying his critics—among them the Nazis, who described his music as “degenerate”—he constantly battled the anti-Semitism that eventually precipitated his flight from Europe to Los Angeles. Yet Schoenberg, synthesizing Wagnerian excess with Brahmsian restraint, created a shock wave that never quite subsided, and, as Sachs powerfully argues, his compositions must be confronted by anyone interested in the past, present, or future of Western music.
Arnold Schoenberg
In this book, Bojan Bujic sets into an appropriate cultural context the immensely rich life of a composer who is, arguably, the key musical personality of the twentieth century. A major force in the development of modern music, Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) is famous for abandoning tonality and introducing the 12-tone 'serial' method of composition. There can be no agreement as to whether Schoenberg is the greatest composer of his time, especially as his innovative musical language did not appeal to all who came after him, but directly or indirectly, he affected so many musicians and listeners of his own and of subsequent generations that his centrality cannot be disputed. In addition to his work as a composer, Schoenberg was an important theorist of tonal music and an enormously influential teacher, with Anton Webern and Alban Berg among his most famous pupils. Brought up in the rich and cosmopolitan cultural life of Vienna, Schoenberg started to play the violin at the age of nine and began experimenting with composition almost immediately, but his education was cut short by the death of his father in 1889. Schoenberg had no formal training in music until he was in his late teens, and throughout his life he remained proud of the fact that so much of what he had absorbed as a youth about music and literature derived from his own tenacity and sense of purpose. Schoenberg first composed in the late Romantic tradition, and his earliest acknowledged works, including the string sextet "Verklarte Nacht", date from the turn of the century. Following a brief interlude in Berlin, where he worked as a cabaret musician and teacher and also wrote the symponic poem "Pelleas und Melisande", he returned to Vienna. Here, he began taking on pupils such as Webern and Berg, and further developed his musical style, in due course causing a sensation with the dissonance of his 'serial' technique and the greater harmonic strangeness and complexity of his material. Schoenberg only returned to something approaching his tonal style decades later, with his "Suite in G" for strings. In 1925, a couple of years after having turned down an offer to become director of the Bauhaus music school because he had been informed of antisemitic tendencies at the institution, Schoenberg moved back to Berlin to take up a post as director of a master class in composition at the Arts Academy, in spite of antisemitic protests appearing in the Zeitschrift fur Musik in reaction to his professorship. Later, when he situation of Jews in Germany became clear to him, Schoenberg increasingly spent time away from Berlin, and finally decided to move to the US in 1933, where he taught in Boston and New York at the Malkin Conservatory. In 1934, Schoenberg moved to Los Angeles, taking up a teaching post at USC and a professorship at UCLA. He lived in Los Angeles, where John Cage became one of his pupils and George Gershwin a good friend, until his death in 1951. There are those who contend that Schoenberg's uncompromising search for an individual voice led him to create music which is too difficult to follow, since many familiar features, which normally enable listeners to find their way through a piece of music, have been removed or radically re-shaped. This is often perceived as the main cause of the isolation of avant-garde music in the late twentieth century, but Bujic argues that these accusations are frequently made before Schoenberg's music has even had a chance to present itself - its difficulty and strangeness are uncritically evoked, often preventing the music from being appreciated in its own right. In this book, Bujic sets out to win more listeners to Schoenberg's music, by introducing his life, work and theories in an accessible, sympathetic manner.
Style and Idea
Author: Arnold Schoenberg
language: en
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Release Date: 1984
One of the most influential collections of music ever published, Style and Idea includes Schoenberg’s writings about himself and his music as well as studies of many other composers and reflections on art and society.