Possessing a soloistic texture and variations in instrumental color defined by Grove's as "chamber music for full orchestra," this 1909 work demonstrates the composer's daring explorations in music that renounces motivic connections and tonality. Includes bar-numbered movements and ample margins at the bottom of each page for notes and analysis.

Between 1908 and 1923, Arnold Schoenberg began writing music that went against many of the accepted concepts and practices of this art. Largely following his intuition during these years, he composed some of the masterpieces of the modern repertoire--including Pierrot lunaire and Erwartung--works that have since provoked a large, though fragmented, body of critical and analytical writing. In this book, Bryan Simms combines a historical study with a close analytical reading of the music to give us a new and richer understanding of Schoenberg's seminal work during this period.

There have been far-reaching changes in the way music theorists and analysts view the nature of their disciplines. Encounters with structuralist and post-structuralist critical theory, and with linguistics and cognitive sciences, have brought the theory and analysis of music into the orbit of important developments in intellectual history. This book presents the work of a group of scholars who, without seeking to impose an explicit redefinition of either theory or analysis, explore the limits of both in this context. Essays on the languages of analysis and theory, and on practical issues such as decidability, ambiguity and metaphor, combine with studies of works by Debussy, Schoenberg, Birtwistle and Boulez, together making a major contribution to an important debate in the growth of musicology.

Schoenberg's theory of "composition with twelve tones" dominated international composition through most of the 20th century — and this edition collects the first steps of the composer's revolution. Pelleas und Melisande (1902) reveals Schoenberg's expanding chromatic language while Five Orchestral Pieces renounces motivic connections as well as tonality.