Aaron J. Rabushka remarked:

>Good 12-tone music? Start with anything by Webern from opus 17 onward.  I
>would also suggest Schoenberg's Variations for Orchestra, Suite for Piano,
>the suite (or whatever it is) for piano, three clarinets, and string trio,
>the Serenade for 7 (IIRC) Instruments and Bass; and Berg's Violin
>Concerto.

to which I feel compelled to add:

12-tone composition, like fugue, is a technique and not a language,
moreover its rigor or lack there of is no guarantee of quality..

May I take the liberty of suggesting that what he has suggested are
"relatively accesible" 12-tone works; except that it's only two middle
movements of the Schoenberg Serenade which are 12-tone.

I've been rehearsing the Schoenberg Suite Op. 29 (3 clarinets, piano,
string trio) since about this time last year, with a group of freelancers
to whom this repertoire is alien--it is very familiar to me from the late
1950s on both from analysis and from performances in New England and in
London.  We've done so far three of a projected four or five performances,
the first after about a dozen rehearsals.  I made a mental bet that the
work could be prepared with no significant discussion of the 12-tone
structure, and so far have won the bet--with the minor exception of
pointing out to my colleagues that the audible thematic unity within and
between movements is of course the result of the piece being based on a
single tone-row.

I've found that this particular piece sounds more and more tonal (E-flat
major, to be exact) and/or polytonal the more and more we work on it, and
the more and more we apply the same performance and rehearsal criteria to
it as we would to any other complex chamber work--refinement of intonation,
balance, ensemble and dynamics.  While this and many other (but not all!)
Schoenberg works are perfrectly playable at their extremely fast metronome
marks (shades of Beethoven), we find that slightly slower pacing
facilitates both clarity and expressivity.

I submit that Schoenberg's 12-tone works, like his earlier ones,
demonstrate basically the same esthetic and the same creative impulse,
and that the obscurity of this repertoire in performance is due to
an insufficient level of preparation.  Compare some of the archival
broadcast-derived recordings of the Variations, Op. 31 from the 1950s
(Maderna, Scherchen, Mitropoulos) or Robert Craft's first shot at them on
LP with the (in)famous Karajan/BPO recording, the CSO/Boulez version or
Craft's newest recording (his third!) for Musicmasters, and you will see
what nearly 50 years of increased familiarity with style can do to make a
work accesible.

It's exactly the same story, unfolding somewhat slower, as with
Stravinsky's major works as recorded first in the 1920s and thereafter to
the present, or as with the biggest Mahler symphonies heard in recordings
(especially live) from the 1950s and then constantly up to our own day.

Joel Lazar
Conductor, Bethesda MD
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