Schoenberg : 'night music', Verklärte Nacht and Erwartung /

Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) is often portrayed as a composer who began as a heart-on-sleeve late Romantic only to evolve during the First World War into an austere, mathematically-obsessed deviser of musical puzzles. Yet to claim that in his music he replaced tonality with its absolute opposite, a...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Whittall, Arnold (Author)
Format: Electronic eBook
Language:English
Published: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2024.
Series:New Cambridge music handbooks
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Online Access:CONNECT
Description
Summary:Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) is often portrayed as a composer who began as a heart-on-sleeve late Romantic only to evolve during the First World War into an austere, mathematically-obsessed deviser of musical puzzles. Yet to claim that in his music he replaced tonality with its absolute opposite, atonality, as the twelve-tone method swept away all trace of traditional harmonic and thematic processes, is as misleading as to argue that romantic warmth and humanity morphed into the purest and most austerely modernistic spirituality. This handbook refocuses the wealth of recent research into two of Schoenberg's major compositions; the expressive character of those relatively early works which centre on nocturnal images of darkness and despair is at its most original and powerful in Verklärte Nacht and Erwartung, where the dramatic interplay between stabilising continuities and disorientating fragmentations reveals the elements of a modernist aesthetics that remained fundamental to Schoenberg's musical thought.
Item Description:Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 30 Nov 2023).
Physical Description:1 online resource (vii, 119 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).
ISBN:9781009082549 (ebook)