Word: schoenberg
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...SCHOENBERG: PIANO MUSIC (Noncsuch). In these small pianistic jewels, which fall so easily on the ears today, Schoenberg did some of his most revolutionary writing. New York's Paul Jacobs is a master of the 20th century style...
...book, Arnold Schoenberg, Charles Rosen skillfully refutes these arguments. First, he places atonality and serialism in the context of the anti-naturalist tendencies which pervaded all the arts during the early part of the century. In the visual arts, the cubists and the Expressionists took bold steps toward the liberation of painting from the constraints of perspective and the desire to reproduce nature on canvas. In literature there was a similar movement away from naturalistic fiction to more introspective and fragmented modes. Composers were also motivated by this desire to free their art from natural as well as conventional constraints...
...what is the most important achievement of this book, Rosen reveals the manner in which non-tonal music can supply both tension and the release of tension that many have criticized Schoenberg for destroying. "The saturation of musical space is Schoenberg's substitute for the tonic chord of the traditional musical language. The absolute consonance is a state of chromatic plenitude." As Rosen points out, Ewartung, one of Schoenberg's early works, ends with all the instruments of the orchestra playing accelerating chromatic scales up and down until a "state of chromatic plenitude" has been created. This state, according...
DESPITE THE inclusion of these insights, however, this book appears not to have been a major effort for Rosen. Though brief, it is fragmented; two of its four chapters are merely reprinted from magazine articles. Much of the material is a rewording of standard observations about Schoenberg, and the book rarely attains the level of brilliant originality that characterized so much of Rosen's The Classical Style...
...still something of a marvel amid the scholarly turgidity and banal superlatives of most music critics. His prose is clear and elegant and his thoughts sharply focused. And through his intellectual gymnastics, he is able to convince his readers that, far from the cerebral monster of popular mythology, Arnold Schoenberg was a composer of uncompromising integrity who responded sincerely and successfully to the musical demands of his time. Perhaps Charles Rosen will bring him a small step closer to the general appreciation he merits...