Review of Jack Boss, Schoenberg’s Twelve-Tone Music: Symmetry and the Musical Idea (Cambridge University Press, 2014)

Abstract

[1] The 2015 winner of the Society for Music Theory's Wallace Berry Award, Jack Boss's landmark book Schoenberg's Twelve-Tone Music, will positively impact the understanding and appreciation of Schoenberg's serial music. Although Boss focuses upon Arnold Schoenberg's well-known serial compositions, using established terminology of late twentieth-century twelve-tone theory, the holistic analyses he undertakes are imaginative, innovative, and unique within the discipline of music theory. The importance of this work does not reside in the presentation of a new set of theoretical tools for exploring serial music, but rather in providing a new conceptual framework for comprehending large-scale unity and coherence in Schoenberg's serial compositions.(1)At the start of the first chapter Boss establishes his theoretical framework by examining Schoenberg's concept of musical Idea as described in his writings and surveying some musical, philosophical, and historical antecedents, as well as modern scholars' works that have been influenced by the concept of the Idea--and in turn have influenced Boss himself. The remaining seven chapters include chronological (by opus number) in-depth analyses of complete works or movements from some of Schoenberg's most revered compositions, including Suite for Piano op. 25, Piano Piece op. 33a, Moses und Aron, and the String Trio op. 45.[2] The theoretical underpinnings of Boss's rigorous analytic survey of Schoenberg's serial works emerge from the composer's statement that "the only analysis there can be for me is one that throws the idea into relief and shows how it is presented and worked out" (1; Boss cites a letter from Schoenberg to Rudolf Kolisch, in Stein 1965, 164-65). Inspired by Schoenberg's desire for comprehensive analyses that trace the working out of a musical idea, Boss examines and adapts Schoenberg's concept of a tonally-based Idea--which contains three dialectic components (Grundgestalt, compositional problem, and solution)--and convincingly readapts it as a large-scale framework for examining long-range coherence within entire serial compositions or complete movements (7).(2) According to Boss's framework, a typical compositional problem results from a conflict between a symmetrical ideal and passages in a serial work that approximate (but do not fully realize) the ideal at the outset of a composition; as the composition unfolds the conflict is elaborated. The resolution of the conflict generally occurs near or at the end of the composition, when the differences between musical elements are finally reconciled. Boss describes a variety of ways in which the presentation of a problem and the process of its elaboration can unfold within a serial composition, including: symmetrical ideals juxtaposed against non-symmetrical elaborations that only approximate them (op. 25, op. 28, op. 33a, Moses und Aron), conflicts generated through row partitions that seemingly create incompatible elements (op. 26, op. 37), and conflicts that are generated between multiple source rows vying for supremacy (op. 45) (8-10). In general, the conflicts associated with the first two stages of the framework (a problem and its elaboration) are frequently resolved by a musical reconciliation between seemingly disparate or conflicting musical elements undergoing a restorative process; these conflicting elements can often be traced to a unifying and symmetrical musical ideal.[3] Despite the subtitle of the book, Symmetry and the Musical Idea, and the title of the first chapter, "Musical Idea and Symmetrical Ideal," there is a curious omission in the first chapter: Boss does not provide a thorough description of symmetry or the symmetrical ideal. While he asserts that imperfect non-symmetrical configurations of the ideal create conflicts in Schoenberg's serial works in multiple ways, the topic of symmetry in the first chapter is somewhat scattered and surprisingly moot. Moreover, the focal points of the solutions to conflicting musical elements in Boss's analyses do not always reside in symmetry. …