The Structure of Atonal Music

Abstract

Atonal music, the remarkable new music created by Arnold Schoenberg, his students Webern and Berg, and other major composers immediately before and after World War I, is generally regarded as critical for subsequent developments in modern music. The present work is the first to set forth a general theoretical framework for the systematic description of the processes underlying this music. The author describes the elemental transformations and relations that provide the basis for cohesive and coherent musical structure. He first presents the basic ideas (pitch-class sets and relations) and the connections between them and then brings these concepts within the scope of a general model of structure (the pitch-class set complex). Throughout, the significance and musical relevance of the theoretical constructs are documented by many excerpts from the large repertory of atonal music.

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