Schoenberg and His School: The Contemporary Stage of the Language of Music

In Schoenberg and His School, René Leibowitz performs a threefold task. He relates the music of Schoenberg and his followers to the age-old tradition of Western polyphony, of which, he says, it is but the latest product. He discusses, with numerous musical examples, all known major works of Schoenberg and of his two great disciples Alban Berg and Anton Webern. And, in the final section of the book, he considers what the tradition represented by these three men could bring to the future, i…