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Schoenberg's decision, around 1908, to begin writing compositions that had no tonal center and few, if any, traditional harmonies, remains an event of surpassing historical importance, one that has had an incalculable influence on the subsequent history of music. Given the central significance of this repertoire, it is surprising that-before now-no one had undertaken the challenge of writing a book devoted to Schoenberg's atonal compositions.
Bryan Simms has responded to this curious lacuna with a book entitled The Atonal Music of Arnold Schoenberg. However, the scope of his book is even wider than is implied by its title: the second chapter discusses Schoenberg's evolution toward atonality and the last chapter addresses the early serial period. Thus, in some important ways, Simms's book discusses at least parts of all three of Schoenberg's principal compositional approaches: tonal, atonal, and serial.
One of the interesting changes that has taken place in Anglo-American studies of Schoenberg's music has been the gradual widening of the perspective with which the music has been examined. Whereas once upon a time, much of the discussion was resolutely technical, with the emphasis placed almost exclusively on the development and use of sophisticated theoretical tools to explain the pitch organization,1 nowadays one is apt to find more discussion of the contexts in which the works originated.2 The Atonal Music of Arnold Schoenberg reflects and celebrates this change by placing considerable stress on factors other than pitch organization. Simms quotes extensively from Schoenberg's writings, coordinates stylistic developments with biographical events, carefully examines Schoenberg's choice of texts, analyzes the meanings of those texts, discusses Schoenberg's interactions with his contemporaries, weighs the rationale for his use of a particular stylistic approach, describes the philosophical and aesthetic ideas that lay behind specific compositional decisions, and much else besides.
When this repertoire is approached in such a comprehensive manner, it quickly becomes apparent that Schoenberg's atonal music did not constitute a single unified, period-not technically, nor stylistically, nor in any other meaningful way. Rather, as Simms demonstrates, it was a complex and ever-changing reality, one that embraced such sharply contradictory tendencies as the motivic intensity of op. 11, no. I and the radical athematicism of Erwartung, op. 17.
Simms's decision to extend the range of his discussion beyond the chronological...