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Bryan R. Simms. The Atonal Music of Arnold Schoenberg 1908-1923. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. ix, 265 pp. ISBN 0-19-512826-5 (hardcover).
Although every life-and-works treatment of Arnold Schoenberg grapples with the subject of Bryan R. Simms' new book, his is the first book-length study devoted exclusively to it. Because of Schoenberg's huge influence as a composer, teacher and thinker, this subject is central not only to his career, but to the history of twentieth-century music generally. The author's credentials for the job are beyond reproach. He has published extensively on Schoenberg, and because he is a former archivist at the Schoenberg Archive in its Los Angeles days, his command of both published and unpublished sources is extensive and shines through on every page.
One of the principle aims of this study is to emphasize the diversity of this music, usually lumped together under the problematic rubric "atonal." As the author says, the atonal style had by 1923 "little in common with what it had been in 1909 . . . At first [it] was touched by angst and spurred on by a need for liberation from the past . . .", but "gradually it lost its spontaneous and emotional character, and . . . came to rely on methodic controls in the fashioning of its materials" (p. 3). After an introductory chapter tracing the early evolution of atonality, the gradual transformation of the atonal style itself is described in four discrete stages, treated in six chapters. The first is the mixed style associated with the settings of the poetry of Stefan George in the Book of the Hanging Gardens, op. 15 and the String Quartet no. 2, op. 10 especially. A former student of mine aptly dubbed this stage the "twilight zone," and the works thus described are perhaps the most appealing in the composer's ?uvre. The second stage includes the fully atonal, and sometimes athematic, piano pieces opp. 11 and 19, the Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 16, and the monodrama Erwartung, op. 17. The instrumental pieces are treated in one chapter, and Erwartung shares Chapter 5 with its companion piece, the opera Die Glückliche Hand, op. 18, in which the "methodic controls" of the third stage already make their...