George Perle has divided this collection into four parts Composers and Works (Bartïk Berg Schoenberg Scriabin and Webern Towards a New Musical Language Some Critical Appraisals of Contemporary Music Theory and On Listening to Modern Music. These 23 articles reviews lectures and speeches represent the best of 50 years of musical thought and insight by one of the keenest musical minds of this century. Sharing this particular composer's point of view leads the reader to an understanding of the linear progression(not easily apparent) from the last century to the next.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1979.

Censorship had an extraordinary impact on Alban Berg's opera Lulu, composed by the Austrian during the politically tumultuous years spanning 1929 to 1935. Based on two plays by Frank Wedekind that were repeatedly banned from publishing and performing up until the end of World War I, thelibretto was in turn censored by Berg himself when he submitted it to authorities in Nazi Germany in 1934. When Berg died before the opera was debuted the next season, the third act was censored by his widow, Helene, and his former teacher, Arnold Schoenberg.In "Taken By the Devil", author Margaret Notley uncovers the unusual and uniquely generative role of censorship throughout the lifecycle of Berg's great opera. Placing the opera and its source material in a wider cultural context, Notley provides close readings of the opera's libretto and score toreveal the precise techniques employed by the composer in negotiating the censors. She goes on to explore the ways Berg chose to augment rather than flatten the discrepancies between various performances of the earlier plays and the opera itself, adding further dimensions of interpretation to thework. Elegantly readable, "Taken by the Devil" is the most meticulously researched and nuanced study of Lulu to date, and illuminates the process of politically-driven censorship of theater, music, and the arts during the tumultuous early twentieth century.

By bringing together the most recent scholarship, this book sheds new light on Berg's life and music. The three main sections are each devoted to a particular genre. The first essay in each section surveys Berg's development within the genre concerned, whilst the subsequent chapters discuss particular works in more detail. An introductory section to the book sets Berg's music in the context of other artistic and musical developments of the period from 1890 to the 1930s.

Alban Berg: A Research and Information Guide is an annotated bibliography concerning both the nature of primary sources related to the composer and the scope and significance of the secondary sources which deal with him, his compositions, and his influence as a composer. The second edition will include research published since the publication of the first edition and provide electronic resources.