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The Musical Idea--And the Logic, Technique, and Art of Its Presentation.

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The Musical Idea--And the Logic, Technique, and Art of Its Presentation. By Arnold Schoenberg. Edited, translated, and with a commentary by Patricia Carpenter and Severine Neff. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. [xxviii. 343 p. ISBN 0-253-21835-7. $27.95.] Bibliographic references, indexes.

In 1995 Columbia University Press published this important work--and saw it rapidly go out of print. For reasons not known to this reviewer, and despite the clear evidence of an eager readership, the book was not reprinted. Eventually the copyright was transferred to Indiana University Press, and so once again it is in circulation. Thankfully; for it is the single best volume extant if one wishes to learn about the technical conception of music held by one of the greatest composers (and greatest music educators) of modern times.

From the "Editor's Preface," we learn that Schoenberg had begun work as early as 1923 on a theoretical text which would present the nature of "the musical idea." The core of this book is a presentation, in English translation, of what appears to be his final attempt to consolidate his thought on the subject into a coherent publication. The German text was spread out over four small notebooks Schoenberg kept in the mid-1930s. Altogether there were about two hundred pages of entries, the first dated 5 June 1934, the last 15 October 1936.

A chief difference between the 1995 edition, and this one, is that whereas in the former Schoenberg's original German and the English translation faced each other, page by page, in the...

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