Schoenberg's Telve-Tone Music Symmetry and the Musical Idea [Paperback]

Jack Boss presents detailed analyses of Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone pieces, bringing the composer's 'musical idea' - problem, elaboration, solution - to life.Jack Boss takes a unique approach to analyzing Schoenberg's twelve-tone music, adapting the composer's notion of a 'musical idea' - problem, elaboration, solution - as a theoretical framework. Containing analytical readings of key works including Moses und Aron, this study provides the reader with a clearer understanding of this vitally important composer.Jack Boss takes a unique approach to analyzing Schoenberg's twelve-tone music, adapting the composer's notion of a 'musical idea' - problem, elaboration, solution - as a theoretical framework. Containing analytical readings of key works including Moses und Aron, this study provides the reader with a clearer understanding of this vitally important composer.Jack Boss takes a unique approach to analyzing Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone music, adapting the composer's notion of a 'musical idea' - problem, elaboration, solution - as a framework and focusing on the large-scale coherence of the whole piece. The book begins by defining 'musical idea' as a large, overarching process involving conflict between musical elements or situations, elaboration of that conflict, and resolution, and examines how such conflicts often involve symmetrical pitch and interval shapes that are obscured in some way. Containing close analytical readings of a large number of Schoenberg's key twelve-tone works, including Moses und Aron, the Suite for Piano Op. 25, the Fourth Quartet, and the String Trio, the study provides the reader with a clearer understanding of this still-controversial, challenging, but vitally important modernist composer.1. Musical idea and symmetrical ideal; 2. Suite for Piano, Op. 25: varieties of idea in Schoenberg's earliest twelve-tone music; 3. Woodwind Quintet, Op. 26: the twelve-tone idea reanimates a large musical form; 4. Three Satires, Op. 28, #3: the el³1