Schoenberg's Program Notes and Musical Analyses

This is the most comprehensive study of Schoenberg's program notes and analyses of his own music yet published. Schoenberg's Program Notes And Musical Analyses illuminates 42 of Schoenberg'scompositions through his own writings. This material in book emphasizes Schoenberg's deep concern for communicating with and educating his audience.

In 1950, as Arnold Schoenberg anticipated thepublication of a collection of 15 of his most important writings, Style and Idea, he was already at work on a second volume to be called Program Notes. Inspired by this idea, Schoenberg's Program Notes AndMusicalAnalyses can boast the most comprehensive study of the composer's writings about his own music yet published. Schoenberg's insights emerge not only in traditional program notes, but also in letters, sketchmaterials, pre-concert talks, public lectures, contributions to scholarly journals, newspaper articles, interviews, pedagogical materials, and publicity fliers. The editions of the texts in this collection, based almostexclusively on Schoenberg's original manuscript sources, include many items appearing in print in English for the first time, as well as more familiar texts that preserve musical and textual information eliminated fromprevious editions. The book also reveals how Schoenberg, desirous to communicate with and educate an audience, took every advantage of changes in technology during his lifetime, utilizing print media, radio broadcasts,record jackets—and had he lived, television—for this purpose. In addition to four chapters in which Schoenberg illuminates 42 of his own compositions, the book begins with chapters on his development and influences, histhoughts about trends in modern music, and, in a nod to the importance of the radio in providing a venue for music analysis, a chapter about Schoenberg's radio broadcasts.