Eric Schissel wrote:

>Jason Greshes wrote on Sunday that Berg learned from Schoenberg what
>Schoenberg wanted to "postulate" to him- apparently in the belief that
>Schoenberg was in the habit of teaching serial composition to his students,
>which so far as I know he certainly .wasn't., or at least not at that stage
>in his career.  Does Mr. Greshes have evidence to the contrary? If Berg
>decided to write serial music it was from either study of Schoenberg's
>scores, or from asking Schoenberg (at length and repeatedly, according
>to an essay in Style and Idea, if Berg was among the students mentioned)
>to describe the method to him, but not from being forcibly exposed to
>the method as a student.  ...

SCHOENBERG WASN'T A SERIAL COMPOSER.

This is rather like saying "Wagner was a Nazi".  Yes the Nazi's pointed
back to Wagner as a precursor, but that does not make him one.  Schoenberg
composed with "the method of 12 tones" to be pedanting adding on "with
each tone related only to the others".  Serial is a word which was created
later, to describe a later form of composition, and was misapplied to
previous works in an attempt by those who were serial composers to claim
that there wasn't any other kind of composition.

Schoenberg at the time was requiring students to write with all 12 tones,
but he only went over his working methods - which would be codified into
his 12 tone system - with a few people: Zemlinsky, Berg and Webern being
three of them.

Stirling S Newberry
[log in to unmask]