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Review Author(s): Michael Graubart Review by: Michael Graubart Source: Tempo, New Series, No. 191 (Dec., 1994), pp. 46-47+49-51Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/945606Accessed: 06-03-2015 20:28 UTC

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46 Book Reviews 46 Book Reviews

appropriate age for a book such as this detailing his accomplishment so far. Sculthorpe's eminence among living composers is still not fully recognized in Britain, though it was immediately obvious, for instance, to audiences at the Vale of Glamorgan Festival this summer, where Sculthorpe was featured composer: 18 of his works were performed and their mastery plain to hear. Mastery in the old-fashioned sense is rare nowadays, for it depends on an unselfconscious confidence in the musical language one is using. Sculthorpe has that confidence: his language is relaxed and communicative, straightforward but not simplistic, deeply immersed in tradition, yet fresh and new.

Deborah Hayes, in her compact but extremely informative biographical section, sheds much light on how and why Sculthorpe has become a

major artist. It isn't essential, but it certainly helps to have been born in the right place at the right time, and Sculthorpe was fortunate in both respects. Before him, Australia had produced no outstanding composer other than the expatriate Percy Grainger. The music that was being written in Australia while Sculthorpe was growing up was mostly a watered-down version of early 20th- century English music. Most of Sculthorpe's contemporaries committed themselves to European modernism, but again in a somewhat dilute form.

Sculthorpe instead was cleverly eclectic, taking what he needed from Europe but relying more on Asian melody and an Asian harmonic stasis. He saw the flat Australian landscape as a metaphor for the non-developing music he wanted to write. Later, he incorporated Aboriginal melodies into his language (he had at first been wary of doing so, though he -used Aboriginal titles from the

start). His use of folk music as the basis of his melodic language is similar to Vaughan Williams or Bartok, and just as the former's music seems to most people to encapsulate Englishness, so Sculthorpe has cannily succeeded in his intention to create an authentic Australian music, without in any sense sounding narrowly nationalistic.

The Greenwood Press's format (they have now published over 50 bio-bibliographies of 20th-century composers) allows for a worklist, discography, performance list and bibliography in addition to biography. Deborah Hayes has been indefatigable in pursuing every last detail and the result is a model of scrupulous research. The worklist includes all the composer's own programme notes, which form a small musical autobiography in themselves. The bibliography, which comprises 1200 items, contains many quotations from reviews which again add substantially to the biographical material. It

appropriate age for a book such as this detailing his accomplishment so far. Sculthorpe's eminence among living composers is still not fully recognized in Britain, though it was immediately obvious, for instance, to audiences at the Vale of Glamorgan Festival this summer, where Sculthorpe was featured composer: 18 of his works were performed and their mastery plain to hear. Mastery in the old-fashioned sense is rare nowadays, for it depends on an unselfconscious confidence in the musical language one is using. Sculthorpe has that confidence: his language is relaxed and communicative, straightforward but not simplistic, deeply immersed in tradition, yet fresh and new.

Deborah Hayes, in her compact but extremely informative biographical section, sheds much light on how and why Sculthorpe has become a

major artist. It isn't essential, but it certainly helps to have been born in the right place at the right time, and Sculthorpe was fortunate in both respects. Before him, Australia had produced no outstanding composer other than the expatriate Percy Grainger. The music that was being written in Australia while Sculthorpe was growing up was mostly a watered-down version of early 20th- century English music. Most of Sculthorpe's contemporaries committed themselves to European modernism, but again in a somewhat dilute form.

Sculthorpe instead was cleverly eclectic, taking what he needed from Europe but relying more on Asian melody and an Asian harmonic stasis. He saw the flat Australian landscape as a metaphor for the non-developing music he wanted to write. Later, he incorporated Aboriginal melodies into his language (he had at first been wary of doing so, though he -used Aboriginal titles from the

start). His use of folk music as the basis of his melodic language is similar to Vaughan Williams or Bartok, and just as the former's music seems to most people to encapsulate Englishness, so Sculthorpe has cannily succeeded in his intention to create an authentic Australian music, without in any sense sounding narrowly nationalistic.

The Greenwood Press's format (they have now published over 50 bio-bibliographies of 20th-century composers) allows for a worklist, discography, performance list and bibliography in addition to biography. Deborah Hayes has been indefatigable in pursuing every last detail and the result is a model of scrupulous research. The worklist includes all the composer's own programme notes, which form a small musical autobiography in themselves. The bibliography, which comprises 1200 items, contains many quotations from reviews which again add substantially to the biographical material. It

seems remarkably complete: the only omission I noticed is an interesting if rather eccentric article by Kelly Trench on Sculthorpe's early works, published I believe some time in the 1970s in the Tasmanian periodical Ossa.

David Matthews

Coherence, Counterpoint, Instrumentation, Instruction in Form (Zusammenhang, Kontrapunkt, Instrumentation, Formenlehre) by Arnold Schoenberg, Translated by Charlotte M. Cross & Severine Neff. Edited and with an Introduction by Severine Neff. University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln and London.

Zusammenhang, Kontrapunkt, Instrumentation, Formen- lehre ('ZKIF') was Schoenberg's first major piece of theoretical writing since the Harmonielehre of 1911. The manuscript consists essentially of Schoenberg's notes, intended for his own use, towards four projected text-books, which were, however, never written. It mainly dates from 1917, but Schoenberg used it when working on other, later, projects, and added two kinds of material to it in later years: firstly around 1926, in the section on counterpoint, some music examples of 12-note hexachordal combinatoriality (as well as some of diatonic counterpoint), and of the first sketches for the theme of the Orchestral Variations, op.31; secondly - in order to facilitate his use of the notes - his own indexes.

This is the first publication of ZKIF, and as such is obviously of importance to anyone interested in the development of Schoenberg's aesthetic and didactic ideas. As Professor Neff says in her introduction,

The sketchy, incomplete enunciation of Schoenberg's theory of coherence in "Zusammenhang" can be fleshed out from ideas propounded in the Harmonielehre and later works, and particularly by looking closely at Schoenberg's notion of a musical theory and his ideas of musical form. Even with its deficiencies, "Zusammen- hang" is uniquely rich among Schoenberg's theoretical works in its many speculative comments on musical perception... In this work also he discusses the principle of developing variation for the first time, illustrating that principle with an analysis of Mozart's "Dissonant" Quartet, K.465.

(In view of my later comments about the

translation, it is noteworthy, incidentally, that she only refers to the 'Coherence' part of

Schoenberg's text.) It has at once to be said, though, that it is hard

going. Notes that trigger something in the mind and memory of their author do not always yield

up their meaning easily to another reader. This is

seems remarkably complete: the only omission I noticed is an interesting if rather eccentric article by Kelly Trench on Sculthorpe's early works, published I believe some time in the 1970s in the Tasmanian periodical Ossa.

David Matthews

Coherence, Counterpoint, Instrumentation, Instruction in Form (Zusammenhang, Kontrapunkt, Instrumentation, Formenlehre) by Arnold Schoenberg, Translated by Charlotte M. Cross & Severine Neff. Edited and with an Introduction by Severine Neff. University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln and London.

Zusammenhang, Kontrapunkt, Instrumentation, Formen- lehre ('ZKIF') was Schoenberg's first major piece of theoretical writing since the Harmonielehre of 1911. The manuscript consists essentially of Schoenberg's notes, intended for his own use, towards four projected text-books, which were, however, never written. It mainly dates from 1917, but Schoenberg used it when working on other, later, projects, and added two kinds of material to it in later years: firstly around 1926, in the section on counterpoint, some music examples of 12-note hexachordal combinatoriality (as well as some of diatonic counterpoint), and of the first sketches for the theme of the Orchestral Variations, op.31; secondly - in order to facilitate his use of the notes - his own indexes.

This is the first publication of ZKIF, and as such is obviously of importance to anyone interested in the development of Schoenberg's aesthetic and didactic ideas. As Professor Neff says in her introduction,

The sketchy, incomplete enunciation of Schoenberg's theory of coherence in "Zusammenhang" can be fleshed out from ideas propounded in the Harmonielehre and later works, and particularly by looking closely at Schoenberg's notion of a musical theory and his ideas of musical form. Even with its deficiencies, "Zusammen- hang" is uniquely rich among Schoenberg's theoretical works in its many speculative comments on musical perception... In this work also he discusses the principle of developing variation for the first time, illustrating that principle with an analysis of Mozart's "Dissonant" Quartet, K.465.

(In view of my later comments about the

translation, it is noteworthy, incidentally, that she only refers to the 'Coherence' part of

Schoenberg's text.) It has at once to be said, though, that it is hard

going. Notes that trigger something in the mind and memory of their author do not always yield

up their meaning easily to another reader. This is

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Book Reviews 47

particularly the case when, as often, Schoenberg lists topics to be discussed and questions to be answered, but leaves the discussions and the answers to the stage - never reached - of actually writing the four books; though some of these matters - and here the editor is of great assistance - were picked up in others of Schoenberg's writings.

The notes sometimes include lists, both exhaustive and exhausting, of all possible permutations of compound topics - some of the shorter ones tending towards the hilarious: p.35: 'I) If a piece is supposed to be long, it will consist either of a) many short parts, or b) a few large parts, or c) many large parts. (the parts can then be kept at a length like those of their kind) II) If a piece is supposed to be short, then it will consist either of a) a few long parts, or b) a few short [parts, or] c) only one short (or long) part.' (One recalls the old Tyrolese proverb, trotted out to amaze tourists: 'When t'cock on t'rubbish-heap do crow, the weather'll change - or on like it is now go!'.) These lists may be revealing of aspects of Schoenberg's mentality, though even here one must remember that a check-list made to ensure that when the eventual book comes to be written all possibilities will be scrutinized does not necessarily presage a ploddingly pedantic working- through of all the possibilities in the book itself.

But mixed in with these sometimes hermetic, sometimes tedious jottings are to be found brilliant, succinct definitions of concepts like 'development', fascinating discussions of organic- ism in general and of coherence in terms of what is varied and what is kept the same between successive statements of a musical figure, of the nature and function of motives, of the relationship between theory in science and in art, and important statements such as that the purpose of theory is to explicate specific works, not to lay down general, asynchronic, immutable laws (note the relevance to criticisms of atonality!). (It is interesting, though, to see how often Schoenberg is tempted into and carried away by self-sustaining, general, even abstract, specula- tions, often carried on in terms of entirely nonmusical, metaphorical images, only to pull himself up short with 'This is probably not true' or 'Is probably not relevant to the musical questions' [my translation] or 'It is necessary that I confine myself to the musical'.)

Above all, the 'Coherence' notes, as Professor Neff says, contain Schoenberg's first major piece of written-down analysis, a short but brilliant motivic analysis of the bridge-passage in the first movement of Mozart's 'Dissonances' quartet which is at the same time the clearest definition I

have come across of Schoenberg's concept of 'developing variation'. Schoenberg picked up this analysis again in his later study, Der musikalische Gedanke und die Logik, Technik und Kunst seiner Darstellung (1934-36), recently published as The Musical Idea and The Logic, Technique and Art of its Presentation by Arnold Schoenberg edited and translated by Patricia Carpenter and Severine Neff (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). His theory of coherence had evolved into that of the primary, generative and unifying idea, and Severine Neff expands the analysis found in ZKIF in her introduction in the present book.

The book is lavishly and beautifully produced, with attractive (though doubtfully relevant) photographs of Schoenberg in likely and unlikely company and a colour reproduction of his little- known abstract expressionist painting Vision (very different from the well-known series of Gazes). It consists of a preface; a very substantial introduction and note on the texts by the editor; the text itself, namely Schoenberg's notes, presented with parallel German and English texts on facing pages, but in the case of the sections on coherence and instrumentation reordered by subject-matter in accordance with Schoenberg's own indexes (the original order being given in Appendix 2); five appendices: 1. Schoenberg's own indexes, 2. A table of contents of each notebook, 3. Two bibliographic lists of his own writings compiled by Schoenberg himself, 4. A comparison of Schoenberg's lists with Rufer's catalogue, and 5. A comparison of Christensen and Christensen (Christensen, Jean, and Jesper Christensen: From Arnold Schoenberg's Literary Legacy: A Catalogue of Neglected Items. Warren, Mich.: Harmonie Park Press, 1988) with Rufer and with Schoenberg; a list of works cited in the present book; and a rather curious index to this book, in which only English words are listed apart from German titles of Schoenberg's writings, musical compositions are not listed at all, and which, to confuse the eye, is printed in two columns without a vertical divider.

Professor Neff s introduction is a major essay of great interest and importance. It is in three parts. The first is an indispensable contribution to the bibliography of Schoenberg's prose writings (taken further by the editor's invaluable footnotes in the main text itself, citing the places in Schoenberg's other writings where the same, similar or related topics are taken up). The second discusses the examples of 12-note hexachordal combinatoriality, and of the first sketches for the theme of the Orchestral Variations, op.31. Here there is an obscure statement to the effect that the first sketches are triadic, when they are in fact

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Book Reviews 49

for the most part barred tetrachordally (and dodecaphonic); only the later examples, in which four-voiced canons are derived from pairs of hexachordally-combinatorial rows, could be said to be triadic - or, less misleadingly, trichordal. The third summarizes and explicates the contents and philosophical implications of the notebooks that make up ZKIF.

Despite the book's luxurious production, errors in English ('become' instead of 'became' on p.liv; 'principle' instead of 'principal' on p.lviii); a musical one ('tritone' - augmented fourth - instead of 'diminished fifth' on p.lxvii;) and a caption printed twice in two different places in a musical example ('d.i: The first appearance ...' in Example 7, p.xlviii), have slipped through the proof reading. (These are only mentioned here because, ironically, Dr. Cross and Professor Neff three times in the main text wrongly 'correct' Schoenberg's admittedly elsewhere often slap-dash and misspelt German where it happens to be right: on p.16, 'bekannt' refers to the singular noun 'Beziehung', and Schoenberg correctly writes 'ist', not 'sind'; on p.2 Schoenberg's 'fur einen ..., der sich freiwillig, selbst verbannt hat' deliberately emphasizes 'selbst': '. . . for one who has voluntarily exiled himself, as against the blander editorially-changed word-order, translated as '. . . for someone who voluntarily has gone into exile'; footnote 10 on p.66 creates a similar situation: Schoenberg's sentence means 'It is wrong for already such a voice to be called melodic; it is merely not unmelodic', implying a threefold gradation between unmelodic and melodic; the revised word-order leads to a quite wrong 'quite' in the translation. On the other hand, on p.104, the translators miss a golden opportunity to correct Schoenberg's repeated misspelling: 'Symetric', etc.!)

It is the translation of Schoenberg's text, though, that is the real problem. It is claimed to be almost literal and word-for-word. As an excuse for its inelegance, this might do if it were true. Unfortunately, often as a result of attaching an adjective or adverb to the wrong word or phrase within a sentence, it frequently modifies, and in some important passages actually reverses or makes nonsense of Schoenberg's meaning. (The title itself gives warning of this; whereas 'Lehren' does indeed mean 'To teach' or 'To instruct', '. .. lehre' - compare 'lore' - means a body of knowledge: 'science of . . .' in the old sense; the word-ending '.. .logy'; sometimes 'theory of . It is not till Note 35 on p.li that we are given a rationale for divergent - but not even then consistently used - translations of '. .

lehre': 'instruction in . . .' and 'theory of.) The bilingual presentation of the main text goes

some way towards ameliorating the consequences of the errors of translation; but only for those readers whose own German is good. Space prevents the correcting of the mistranslations and other confusions here, but this reviewer would be pleased to supply a list of the more important ones to any interested reader.

On pp.8/91, Schoenberg enunciates some important and provocative principles of art and its comprehension: 'coherence ... binds individual phenomena intoforms.', 'A form (the form of the

phenomena) is an artistic form if the recognizable connections . . are essential in the same wayfor the

part as for the whole', 'The degree of comprehensibility depends on the type and number of connections used .. .'; 'The limits of comprehensibility are not the limits of coherence . . .'. Another provocative statement - and a mistranslation that almost reverses Schoenberg's meaning - is to be found at the top of p.10/11: 'Even without a shared content coherence may be direct if the purpose is held in common.' is the translator's version. But 'mittelbar' means 'indirect'. What Schoenberg says is 'There can be an indirect coherence even without shared content if the purpose is shared.'

On pp. 12/13, Schoenberg introduces a curious, lengthy parable about a wardrobe whose key is lost, intended to explicate the process of reaching understanding, with 'If I make this statement [this refers to the previous sentence, in which the recognition that parts of a thing are similar to those of an already familiar thing is made the prerequisite for understanding] the basis of my following considerations, I do not mean that it states conclusively and completely what under- standing is. Rather, it is as though: . . .'. But a redundant comma tempts the translators into a reversal of the logical structure: 'If I base this statement upon my ensuing observation, .'

On pp.26/27, Schoenberg enters into an argument with himself: 'A motive is something that gives rise to a motion.' This fascinating dynamic view leads him to play with ideas of motion and motor, only to decide that he might be wrong to equate motive and motor. This leads to a discussion of rhythm in which Schoenberg seems, surprisingly (or, as they might have said in Darmstadt, not surprisingly) to equate rhythm with regular repetition and relates it to 'Takt' - an unfortunately ambiguous word, meaning both 'bar' and 'beat', which creates inconsistencies in the translation. 1 This notation refers to the pairs of pages of the parallel texts.

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50 Book Reviews

Now we come to some stimulating and illuminating motivic analysis, first of an example of Schoenberg's, then of the previously mentioned Mozart bridge-passage, together with discussions of liquidation and developing variation. On p.38, Schoenberg explains the derivation of motifs from each other by writing 'b1=-2, where a is a motif consisting of one crotchet and b one of two quavers; in bar 3, b1 changes the latter into two pairs of semiquavers, and Schoenberg is saying that these derive from the second half of al, a variant of a at the beginning of bar 2 which turns the crotchet into a quaver and two semiquavers. By writing 'a' in the above equation instead of 'a1', Schoenberg already introduces a degree of mystification, which is then compounded by the editor's explanatory footnote on p.39, which refers to bar 2 instead of bar 3.

There follows a discussion of the function of tonality, which includes the significant remark that in certain cases it can be dispensed with, and of its establishment; which, Schoenberg says, can sometimes be achieved merely by non- contradiction; plagal ('weak') final cadences are cited as proofs of this. But then examples of harmonically unsuccessful closes are cited as proofs of the opposite: Schumann (unspecified), and - revealingly - the end of the second movement of Beethoven's Eighth Symphony, with its in principle classical but exaggeratedly strong and sustained subdominant digression just before what Schoenberg calls 'the coincidental B- flat major' of the end. Revealing, because of Schoenberg's Freudian slip (or is this a consequence merely of early 20th-century performance practice?) in calling the movement 'the Andante movement'; it is marked 'Allegretto scherzando' in Beethoven's score, and just as for Schoenberg 'Scherzo' means a form, not a piece of joky character, so here he seems to betray his discomfort at the witty, irreverent nature, both harmonically and in matters of tempo, rhythm and figuration, of what 'ought to be' a symphonic slow movement.

Finally, Schoenberg reverts to a consideration of rhythm and metre. Here (as is even more strikingly the case in the section of the notes dealing with 'Form') he speculates about origins, without examining historical and ethnomusico- logical data. '2-beat rhythm (original rhythm) comes from our two legs (hands) and from our gait'. True; though he might have added that our experience of breathing, of sleeping and waking, of all our physical and psychic processes of mounting tension and its release are binary, and that many of them contain a much stronger feeling of (sometimes prolonged) anacrusis and

the discharge of energy in the downbeat. But then he continues with a speculative, contingent, mechanistic (and military!) hypothesis: 'The 3- beat rhythm ... could come from a change of step', without considering the evidence (musico- logical and psychological) that it arose first, through agogic accentuation reinforcing or replacing dynamic, in the form of 'long-short, long-short', and then.through the reassertion of binary rhythm in the form of the bisection of the long sounds into two short ones.

The 'Coherence' section of ZKIF is by far the longest and most rich. The 'Counterpoint' notes are sketchy and brief. First, a discussion of what independent voices and melodic voices are, complete with an interesting, if slightly pedantic, demonstration that the second voice of a canon can logically be considered independent. Complete, too, on pp.66/67 with an example of the sense being fundamentally distorted in the translation by the association of an adverb with the wrong verb: the English text says 'The independence of development in a voice merely consists of following the requirements and possibilities of its motive.' (Emphases original.) What Schoenberg says is 'The independence ofdevelopment of a voice lies in its only following the requirements and possibilities of its motive.' The former trivializes both the criterion for independence and the concept of independence itself; the latter emphasizes the freeness of the voice, and provides a strong and active criterion for independence. After a sketch for a teaching syllabus, there are the music examples, added later without any explanations. The dodecaphonic ones are followed by four very brief diatonic ones, one of which is curious: the rest are either written in C and F (bass) clefs and with key- signatures of two or four flats, or follow on from these with the implication that the clefs and signatures remain the same; but the second one, without clefs or signatures, can only be made to follow from the first by an improbable rearrange- ment of voices and staves. Professor Neff supplies G (treble) and bass clefs, which creates a four- voiced mensural canon in which all the voices are plain arpeggiations of an A-minor triad, with parallel unisons at one point; since the following two examples seem to be sketches for mensural canons, it seems likely that the second one is a mere rhythmic sketch without pitch implications.

The third section of the notes, on 'Instru- mentation', is substantial (though not as much so as the 'Coherence' part), and stresses the idea that, whereas traditional orchestration books deal mainly with the ranges and capabilities of individual instruments, instrumentation should

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Book Reviews 51

be seen not as a 'penny plain, tuppence coloured' addition, but an integral part of the composition process that begins with considerations of types of texture and goes on to questions of balance and clarity. It is, therefore, a pity that at this point the translators seem to have lost interest in trying to understand what Schoenberg is saying, or at least to ensure that their versions make corresponding (or any) sense.

Thus, paragraph 3) on p.78 specifically complains of the old methods that they are mainly 'Instrumentenkunde' - the knowledge of instruments - which the translators render on p.29 as 'instrumentation', thus making nonsense of Schoenberg's central point: that it is necessary to teach the art of instrumentation (as a branch of composition) and not just the knowledge of instruments as such. And in the next sentence, 'II. The main defect of the old method: the true basis for all instrumentation is composition itself . . .', we fall foul of the multiple meanings of 'Satz': 'setzen' means 'to set'; 'Satz' can mean 'movement'

(as in 'second movement'), 'texture' (as in

'polyphonic texture'), or 'composition' itself, and the following table of kinds of texture makes it clear that here it means 'texture' and not 'composition'. The same is true of the next sentence, which in any case has lost the crucial subject of the second clause and therefore makes no sense, right or wrong: 'Therefore the student must first choose: what is the nature of a composition, so that [?] may be suitable for this or that instrumental combination' (my question- mark) should read 'Therefore the student must first choose: what should the character of a texture that is suitable for this or that instrumental combination be'. Yet again, in the second line of the following list, and on much of p.81, 'texture' should replace 'composition'. At last, on p.81, footnote 51 addresses the possibility of an alternative translation of 'Satz', but offers 'Setting' rather than 'Texture'.

A marginal note on pp.84/85, the lines running vertically along the margin, has been completely corrupted in the translation. It refers to a very long list of conditions under the heading 'What conditions do instruments impose on a setting?' and, in the translators' version, reads 'It is not necessary to consider these conditions [!]. Often one choice suffices because the instrument is not exposed, often because it is supported by other (more capable) linstruments}'. What the original says is 'Not all these conditions need to be considered. Often a selection [of conditions!] suffices, because ...' (the italics and the parentheses in square brackets are mine).

It is the succinct enunciation on pp.98/99-100/

101 of Schoenberg's views on transposing instruments that provides the clearest evidence that by this stage the process of translation has become a mechanical one. 'In learning the C major scale, the horn player (or trumpeter or clarinettist) should not play the key in which no valves are depressed (as has been the practice until now), but should use instead the key that really sounds C major' is, to this reader at least, fairly impenetrable. But what Schoenberg says is perfectly clear: 'The horn player (or trumpeter or clarinettist) should learn as the C major scale not that key in which no valves are depressed (as has been the practice until now), but that scale that actually sounds C-major'. The final substantive remark of the 'Instrumentation' section relates the style of piano reductions (a better term than

'arrangements') to the way pianists are accustomed to play them.

Surprisingly, 'Instruction in Form' is the shortest section. It consists merely of the beginning of a sketchy attempt at a classification of forms, with some speculation (again without historical data) about origins. Nevertheless, the following has resonance: 'NB. How is it that: in undergoing dissolution, every theme or motive loses individuality (harmonic and rhythmic), becomes more ordinary, and ends up as a structure with relatively uncharacteristic features'.

One turns with some relief to the useful appendices, already listed above. Appendix 1, A

Transcription of Schoenberg's Indexes, is presented with parallel texts, but has been rearranged in the alphabetical order of the English words; Appendix 2 is the editor's table of the order in which topics appear in Schoenberg's original manuscript. The two bibliographical lists of his own writings that form Appendix 3 were compiled in the 1940s - in English - by Schoenberg himself, while Appendices 4 and 5 collate the various catalogues and methods of identification of Schoenberg's prose manuscripts by Rufer, Schoenberg himself and Christiansen and Christiansen, and are, like the editor's introduction to the whole book, indispensable bibliographically.

A curate's egg, then: a central text mixing stimulating, provocative and enlightening state- ments and discussions with private aides memoires, jottings and lists of topics tending to the tedious if not hermetic, beautifully presented, but marred for readers without excellent German by an increasingly misleading translation; and a major introductory essay and appendices of great value and importance.

Michael Graubart

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