Schoenberg and the New Music: Essays by Carl Dahlhaus

This book is a collection of essays, by the leading German musicologist of our day, on one of the most controversial and influential composers of our century: Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg is considered here as a historical figure, as a thinker and theoretician and as a composer whose works may be subjected to technical analysis and/or examined in relation to the history of ideas. Above all, he is considered in the context of the 'New Music', the historical and cultural movement of the first two decades of this century which embrace musicians such as Webern, Schreker and Scriabin (all of whom are allotted individual essays), as well as Schoenberg himself. In addition to historical and analytical essays there are essays of a broader cultural-historical and even sociological import which should interest all those involved with twentieth-century music and ideas.

Table of Contents:
Translators' introduction; 1. 'New Music' as historical category; 2. Progress and the avant garde; 3. Avant garde and popularity; 4. New Music and the problem of musical genre; 5. Problems of rhythm in the New Music; 6. Tonality: structure or process?; 7. Schoenberg's poetics of music; 8. Schoenberg's aesthetic theology; 9. Schoenberg and programme music; 10. Musical prose; 11. Emancipation of the dissonance; 12. What is 'developing variation'?; 13. Schoenberg and Schenker; 14. Schoenberg's Orchestral Piece Op. 16, No. 3 and the concept of Klangfarbenmelodie; 15. 'The Obbligato Recitative'; 16. Expressive principle and orchestral polyphony in Schoenberg's Erwartung; 17. Schoenberg's late works; 18. The fugue as prelude: Schoenberg's Genesis composition, Op. 44; 19. Rhythmic structures in Webern's Orchestral Pieces, Op. 6; 20. Analytical instrumentation: Bach's six-part ricercar as orchestrated by Anton Webern; 21. Schreker and modernism: on the dramaturgy of Der ferne Klang; 22. Structure and expression in the music of Scriabin; 23. Plea for a Romantic category: the concept of the work of art in the newest music; 24. On the decline of the concept of the musical work; 25. The musical work of art as a subject of sociology; 26. Form Translated by Stephen Hinton; 27. Composition and improvisation; 28. A rejection of material thinking?; Notes; List of sources; Index.