Among several historic musical anniversaries celebrated this year—including the centenary of “Rhapsody in Blue”—an easily overlooked one especially deserves mention, since it marked an artistic ...

I always considered Arnold Schoenberg’s 12-tone, atonal music pretentious noise. But I’ve been forced to change my mind after reading Mark Swed’s enlightening analysis (“Driven to Express Himself,” ...

The spikey, angular music sometimes called "12-tone music" invented by Arnold Schoenberg remains a challenge to the ears of many listeners today. But before Schoenberg turned away from traditional ...

Greg Sandow doesn’t mention the crucial rule of classic 12-tone (or dodecaphonic) music: that no tone may be repeated until all 12 tones in the row have been used (“Serialism as a Museum Piece,” The ...

American composer George Perle, a respected theorist, teacher, author and eloquent advocate for atonal music, died at his home in Manhattan Friday, Jan. 23. He was 93. Although Perle embraced the ...

For more than seventy years, Arnold Schoenberg’s student Egon Wellesz (1885-1974) occupied a position at the center of international musical life. Composer, scholar, critic, teacher, Wellesz was ...

Reading Allen Shawn’s Arnold Schoenberg’s Journey reminded me of an anecdote Oscar Levant gave about Schoenberg in his Memoirs of an Amnesiac: Once he was humming an unhummable theme with unnegotiable ...

It would be hard to come up with a more radically divisive major composer than Arnold Schoenberg, who was born in Vienna in 1874 and died in Los Angeles in 1951. It would be equally hard to come up ...