Recompositions by Schoenberg Stravinsky and Webern

Abstract

MANY twentieth-century works absorb and modify compositions from earlier periods. The resulting are often works of surprising originality. They paradoxically reflect the characteristic elements of twentieth-century musical structure even as they appear most immersed in the past. The most interesting recompositions involve the imposition of a new, idiomatically post-tonal musical structure onto an intact tonal model. In pieces such as Stravinsky's Pulcinella, Schoenberg's Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra, and Webern's orchestration of the Ricercare from Bach's The Musical Offering, composers create new works by recomposing older ones. Recomposition is a genre with a long history. In the fifteenth century, the Renaissance concept of imitatio found musical expression in various kinds of pieces: arrangements of songs for instruments, the adding of voices to a preexistent piece, the revision of an earlier work, and the structural modeling of one piece upon another. In the later Renaissance, this concept gave rise to the widespread use of parody, most obviously in Masses based upon preexistent polyphonic compositions.2 More recent examples include, among many others, Bach's arrangements of Vivaldi, Liszt's settings of Beethoven, and Mahler's orchestrations of Schumann's Symphonies.3 The desire to recompose the works of one's predecessors seems to be almost as old as Western music itself.