Schoenberg: Verklärte Nacht; Pelleas Und Melisande

At the beginning of the twentieth century composers were faced with a problem. Composers like Strauss and Wagner had stretched the limits of conventional tonality to the limit, increasing chromaticm to an almost continuous level. Basically everything had been done before. So many composers were looking for new ideas, some like Stravinsky, turned to Neo-Clacissism (The Rake's Progress), others, Bartok, turned to folk music (Miraculous Mandarin), and others just kept on churning out what they had done before (Strauss - Der RosenKavalier). Schoenberg, however, decided to set classical music on a path that nearly led to its own self destruction. ...  Read the complete review

Schoenberg is commonly dismissed, by musicians who know nothing about the matter, as a writer of mechanical, mathematical music. This is because of his invention of serial, twelve-tone music, in which all the music of a piece is derived from a fixed ordering of the twelve semitones called The Row. Musicians who have given the matter no thought at all pompously claim that this Row somehow writes the music for you, and that composers without any ability can use it to churn out music. In fact quite the opposite is true. The tone-row is an extremely difficult tool to use, and takes none of the decision making out of composition. Besides which, Schoenberg started ...  Read the complete review