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A composer's study and celebration of a difficult but influential artist, his work, and his time
Proposing that Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) has been more discussed than heard, more tolerated than loved, composer Allen Shawn puts aside ultimate judgments about Schoenberg's place in musical history to explore the composer's fascinating world in a series of "linked essays--soundings" that are more searching than analytical, more suggestive than definitive. In an approach that is unusual for a book of an avowedly introductory character, the text plunges into the details of some of Schoenberg works, while at the same time providing a broad overview of his involvement in music, painting and the history through which he lived. Emphasizing music as an expressive art of rhythms and tones, Shawn approaches Schoenberg primarily from the listener's point of view, uncovering both the seeds of his radicalism in his early music and the traditional bases of his later work. Although liberally sprinkled with musical examples, the text can be read without them. By turns witty, personal, opinionated and instructive, "Arnold Schoenberg's Journey" is above all an appreciation of a great musical and artistic imagination in a time unlike any other.
Proposing that Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) has been more discussed than heard, more tolerated than loved, composer Allen Shawn puts aside ultimate judgments about Schoenberg's place in musical history to explore the composer's fascinating world in a series of "linked essays--soundings" that are more searching than analytical, more suggestive than definitive. In an approach that is unusual for a book of an avowedly introductory character, the text plunges into the details of some of Schoenberg works, while at the same time providing a broad overview of his involvement in music, painting and the history through which he lived. Emphasizing music as an expressive art of rhythms and tones, Shawn approaches Schoenberg primarily from the listener's point of view, uncovering both the seeds of his radicalism in his early music and the traditional bases of his later work. Although liberally sprinkled with musical examples, the text can be read without them. By turns witty, personal, opinionated and instructive, "Arnold Schoenberg's Journey" is above all an appreciation of a great musical and artistic imagination in a time unlike any other.
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Reviews
"A thorough, caring, readable and, yes, witty survey of Schoenberg's oeuvre, musical and visual, and of his influence on European impressionism and American jazz. Most crucial is Shawn's statement--in the face of decades of brainy theses on the twelve-tone system--that 'Schoenberg never ceased to hear tonally.' That I, a French-oriented composer who have never been especially beguiled by the so-called Viennese School, found Allen Shawn's book an illuminating delight from start to finish, is the highest compliment I can pay."
Ned Rorem
"Arnold Schoenberg's Journey is comprehensive, enlightening, and a consistent pleasure to read, exactly the book so long needed by the general music-loving public. Free of polemics and analytical jargon--the tone is remote from anything I have found in the literature about the composer--Allen Shawn starts with a clean slate and integrates his own musical background with what he has found in Schoenberg. Whereas earlier writers have skimped on the biography, Shawn tells the story in full and in perceptive relationship to the music. Voila! The complex personality of the great composer begins to emerge."
Robert Craft, author of Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship