Schoenberg's Atonal Music

Jack Boss is Professor of Music Theory and Composition at the University of Oregon. His previous book, Schoenberg's Twelve-Tone Music: Symmetry and the Musical Idea (Cambridge, 2014) received the Wallace Berry Award from the Society for Music Theory in 2015. His articles can be found in the Journal of Music Theory, Music Theory Spectrum, Perspectives of New Music, Music Theory Online, Music Analysis, Intégral, and Gamut.

• 1. Tonal oder Atonal? The complicated, contradictory nature of Schoenberg's middle-period music (Op. 11, No. 1); 2. Piano pieces Op. 11, Nos. 2 and 3: The latter movements of a remarkably progressive cycle; 3. Das Buch der hängenden Gärten, Op. 15, Nos. 7 and 11: basic images in two of the earliest atonal pieces; 4. Erwartung, Op. 17: A Leitmotivic Opera and a 'cumulative setting', atomized; 5. Six little piano pieces, Op. 19 (Nos. 2, 3, and 6): musical idea and basic image in miniature; 6. Pierrot lunaire, Op. 21, Nos. 1, 14 and 21: basic image at the apex of its development; 7. Summary, and the way forward to twelve-tone music.

'Schoenberg's Atonal Music offers a study of the endlessly fascinating and enigmatic music Schoenberg wrote from around 1908 to roughly 1920. Jack Boss is a complete master of the music and the surrounding literature; he has an appropriate and effective analytical methodology, and he offers a synoptic understanding of these challenging musical works that greatly enriches our understanding of them. This book is an important prequel to Schoenberg's Twelve-Tone Music (Cambridge, 2014), which deservedly received the Wallace Berry award from the Society for Music Theory.' Joseph Straus, City University of New York