For the last two months, I have worked my way through this book, and I have hardly scratched the surface: to do it properly, I would need a second transit, with much work at the keyboard. I hope to do this; I hope that my intention may remain until late this fall when I might have time to begin the task, applying these lessons to the work of improvisation at the organ and piano.
Some of my “teachers” are gentle and pleasant: some are prickly. Schoenberg (1874-1951) comes across in this book as a a hard-bitten old drillmaster of a teacher, immensely intelligent, with a vast knowledge of music and little patience for slovenly work or ignorance. Like many other Austrians and Germans of his generation, he fled the horrors of National Socialism, having to start over in his old age as a professor of music at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the nearby University of Southern California. The low level of the American students he there encountered, much lower than what he had known in Vienna, caused him to revise his pedagogy, as his editors describe in the Preface (p. xiii), creating this textbook for undergraduate students of composition and analysis. Schoenberg writes in the Appendix (p. 214): “The principal aim of this textbook is... to provide for the average [music] student of the universities, who has no special talent for composing or for music at all." [my emphasis]
Nonetheless, he took up the task and devoted some ten years and four revisions to this volume. The editors (Gerald Strang and Leonard Stein), who knew Schoenberg well, attest that “all his life Schoenberg laboured to share with his students his knowledge of music” (p. xiv).
One might expect a book from this hand to focus on the areas in which Schoenberg himself worked: the atonal or “twelve-tone” music which he developed with others, notably Alban Berg and Anton Webern, in the early twentieth century. But one finds none of this in the book: he focuses instead on the work of Ludwig van Beethoven, with examples from other classical masters such as Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, and Brahms. Schoenberg insisted that if one is to compose in a more modern style, one must first master the traditional skills represented by these composers. Copies of Beethoven's piano sonatas and string quartets are essential to a proper study of this book, for Schoenberg refers to them constantly as examples for the student.
He begins with the construction of the Phrase, then the Motive, the connection of Motives into simple Themes such as Sentences and Periods, their accompaniment, and the building from these smaller elements of complete smaller musical forms, such as the ternary Song Form, the Minuet, the Scherzo, the Theme and Variations. From there, he explores the larger forms such as Rondo and Sonata-Allegro. For my purposes, the earlier parts of the book are more applicable – I must crawl before I can walk, and running is out of the question [an example of the latter would be the organ improvisations of Anton Bruckner, which were reportedly large symphonic-scale works similar to what one hears in his orchestral symphonies. I will never reach that level; I will be content if I can improvise a decent prelude and postlude for church].
As I mentioned, I have worked my way to the end of this book. If the Lord allows, I hope to start over in October or November, working with the book while at the keyboard and seeking to imitate the forms as they are used in the works of Beethoven. The inestimable value of this book for the organist and improviser is that Schoenberg shows how this can be done.
To make sketches [or, for the improviser, to try many approaches with a given theme or concept in rehearsal] is a humble and unpretentious approach toward perfection. A beginner who is not too self-assured, who does not believe too firmly in his 'infallibility', and who knows that he has not yet reached technical maturity, will consider everything he writes as tentative (p. 117).
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