The Atonal Music of Arnold Schoenberg, 1908-1923 (review)

The Atonal Music of Arnold Schoenberg 1908-1923. By Bryan R. Simms. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. [ix, 265 p. ISBN 0-19-512826-5. $49.95.]

The music that Schoenberg wrote between his break with tonality and his unveiling of the twelve-tone method has fascinated and perplexed musicians, scholars, and audiences down to the present day. Joining the substantial literature on individual works and several previous books that have examined parts of the repertory from various perspectives, Simms's monograph is the first in English to survey the entire period. It thus fills a gap in scholarship between Walter Frisch's The Early Works of Arnold Schoenberg, 1893-1908 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993) and Ethan Haimo's Schoenberg's Serial Odyssey: The Evolution of his Twelve-Tone Method, 1914-1928 (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1990). While Simms's book appears to have been aimed at a more general readership than these studies are, it will be a valuable resource for anyone interested in Schoenberg's music.

Building on his long-term engagement with Schoenberg's music, Simms interweaves analytical and descriptive commentary, references to the sketches and creative process, statements from Schoenberg's own writings, biographical material, and insights from recent historical and analytical studies, all presented in an engaging and readable manner. After a brief introduction to the term "atonality," individual chapters focus on groups of works related by genre or structural features while tracing the overall chronology. The bulk of the text consists of overviews of the formal, melodic, and harmonic features of each piece, including discussions of most individual movements for multimovement works.

As is to be expected with a book that deals with so much music, not all of the analyses are completely convincing. For example, the interpretation of the first of the Five Pieces for Orchestra as a fugue (pp. 75- 76) distorts the formal balance of the piece and obscures the degree to which the contrapuntal techniques of stretti and augmentation were used not as an end in themselves but as a means for creating, as Schoenberg wrote, "an uninterrupted change of colors, rhythms, and moods" (cited in Music Since 1900, ed. Nicolas Slonimsky, 5th ed. [New York: Schirmer Books, 1994], 132). In other cases significant details are omitted, as in the discussion of the fragmentary "Liebeslied" (p. 164), where it would have been worth pointing out that the transpositional levels of the five-note violin melody were derived from the pitch-class content of the segment itself, a clear link to techniques Simms discusses in the context of opp. 18 and 22.

Simms effectively introduces many central concepts for Schoenberg's music, including his approach to tonality, the idea of developing variation, and the unity of musical space. The presentation of what Schoenberg called "composing with tones" is derailed somewhat by his attempt to link it more directly to the twelve-tone method and "composing with basic shapes" (pp. 180-81). As a result, Simms cordons off those examples of "composing with tones" that are based on the manipulation of ordered and unordered collections of pitch-classes into a new category he calls "permutational variation" (p. 174), a distinction that goes against Schoenberg's more inclusive presentation of the concept (Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea, ed. Leonard Stein [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975], 89, 247).

In several cases it would have been useful to have more explicit discussions of how the analyses presented here relate to previous studies (as, for example, in the case of the symphony sketch material (pp. 153- 62), which could have been profitably placed in the context of Haimo's more detailed presentation). Similarly, it would have been helpful for Simms to clarify his approach to pitch, such as in the presentation of the "triadic tetrachords" (pp. 16- 17), and how it relates to current set- theoretical models. There are gestures in this direction...