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 [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>