Reginald Smith Brindle: The New Music: The Avant-garde since 1945, 2nd ed (1975/1987)

This guide to the more adventurous evolutions of music since 1945–pointillism, post-Webernism, integral serialism, free dodecaphony, aleatory and indeterminate music, graphics, musique concrète, electronic music, and theatre music–was first published in 1975 and has been reprinted several times. For this second edition, Smith Brindle has added a new chapter reviewing developments over the decade since first publication. He discusses the decline of experimentalism and the reaction against increasing cerebralism and complexity as variously illustrated by the more recent works of Stockhausen, the minimalist works of Reich and Glass, and the partial return to romanticism. He also reviews the technological revolution which has taken place in computer music and concludes that the future of music will for the time being be most closely associated with technological change and development, rather than with radical changes in compositional techniques.

First edition published 1975
Publisher Oxford University Press, 1987
ISBN 0193154714, 9780193154711
222 pages

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Arnold Schoenberg: Structural Functions of Harmony (1954–) [EN, ES]

“This book is Schoenberg’s last completed theoretical work and represents his final thoughts on the subject of classical and romantic harmony.

The earlier chapters recapitulate in condensed form the principles laid down in his Theory of Harmony; the later chapters break entirely new ground, for they analyze the system of key relationships within the structure of whole movements and affirm the principle of “monotonality,” showing how all modulations within a movement are merely deviations from, and not negations of, its main tonality.

Schoenberg’s argument is supported by music examples, which range from entire development sections of classical symphonies to analyses of the experimental harmonic progressions of Strauss, Debussy, Reger, and Schoenberg’s own early music. The final chapter, “Apollonian Evaluation of a Dionysian Epoch,” discusses the music of our time, with particular reference to the possibility of new methods of harmonic analysis.

Structural Functions of Harmony is a standard work on its subject and provides an invaluable key to the development of musical structure during the last two hundred and fifty years. This new edition, with corrections, a new preface, and an index of subject headings, has been prepared under the editorial supervision of Leonard Stein.”

First published in 1954 by Williams and Norgate Limited
Revised Edition with Corrections
Edited by Leonard Stein
Publisher Ernest Benn Limited, 1969; published in Faber Paperbacks by Faber and Faber, London, 1983
ISBN 0571130003
203 pages

Structural Functions of Harmony (1954/1983, no OCR)
Funciones estructurales de la armonía (Spanish, trans. Juan Luis Milan Amat, 1990, 161 MB, added on 2013-12-11)

René Leibowitz: Schoenberg and His School: The Contemporary Stage of the Language of Music (1947/1949)

“Founder of the atonal school of composition, Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) single-handedly revolutionized the whole of 20th century music. Recognizing that the tonal system of the past 250 years had outlived its usefulness, Schoenberg developed an entirely new system for organizing pitch, dividing the scale into 12 equal tones and eliminating the tonal center which had already reached its vanishing point in the chromaticism of Richard Wagner His twelve-tone scale set composers free from the strictures of the seven-tone scale, allowing them to explore in full the expanded tonal materials of the chromatic scale.

In this now-historic study of Schoenberg’s music and its impact on 20th-century composition, composer/conductor René Leibowitz–a student of both Schoenberg and Webern–traces the history of musical thought from the Renaissance through the early part of the 20th century, thus setting the stage for Schoenberg’s revolutionary abandonment of tonality. He also assesses the works of Schoenberg’s two star pupils. Alban Berg and Anton Webern He shows how Schoenberg’s methods were assimilated–conservatively by Berg and radically by Webern–maintaining throughout that theory was handmaiden to compositional artistry and not the other way around.

Originally published in 1949, Schoenberg and His School was in many ways a musical polemic, an artistic manifesto aimed at focusing public attention on the then neglected works of the atonal composers. Today, with the 1974 Centenary Celebration of Schoenberg’s birth, Leibowitz’ work has assumed renewed importance. Considered one of the most influential interpretations ever published of Schoenberg’s musical aesthetics and philosophy, it remains the touchstone for future considerations of Schoenberg’s contributions to 20th century music.”

First published as Schoenberg et son école, 1947.

This is an unabridged republication of the first edition published by Philosophical Library, New York, 1949.
Translated by Dika Newlin
Publisher Da Capo Press, New York, 1975/1979
ISBN 0306800209
305 pages

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