Schoenberg’s Atonal Music: Musical Idea, Basic Image, and Specters of Tonal Function Jack Boss

Abstract

Schoenberg’s Atonal Music: Musical Idea, Basic Image, and Specters of Tonal Function is the ‘prequel’ to Jack Boss’s award-winning monograph Schoenberg’s 12-Tone Music: Symmetry and the Musical Idea (Cambridge, 2014). The book focuses on the composer’s brief but intensely productive middle period, which began in 1908 and was effectively tapering off by 1916, followed by a transition to dodecaphony. Boss’s meticulous and engaging analytical study of selected works from this period, using primarily pitch-class set theory, is certainly a welcome addition to the Schoenberg literature, especially since this enigmatic music is chronically under-researched and ‘perpetually misunderstood’, as the author notes (p. 40). Not only is this atonal—or ‘pantonal’, as Schoenberg preferred—music rather difficult to listen to, but the relative paucity of sketches and other documentary evidence from this period also presents some challenges to scholars. Indeed, Boss’s study serves, at least in part, as something of a corrective to a legacy of scholarship that, at worst, has regarded Schoenberg’s atonal music as essentially unanalysable and has repeated inherited truisms about its idiosyncratic athematicism, and nebulous connections to the composer’s biography and the zeitgeist of early twentieth-century Vienna. But, as Schoenberg’s Atonal Music also clearly demonstrates, there is still considerable ambivalence and ongoing disagreement about this music in the analytic literature.