Review of Jack Boss, <i>Schoenberg’s Twelve-Tone Music: Symmetry and the Musical Idea</i> (Cambridge University Press, 2014)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The 2015 winner of the Society for Music Theory's Wallace Berry Award, Jack Boss's landmark book Schoenberg's Twelve-Tone Music, will positively impact the understanding and appreciation of Schoenberg's serial music.Although Boss focuses upon Arnold Schoenberg's well-known serial compositions, using established terminology of late twentieth-century twelve-tone theory, the holistic analyses he undertakes are imaginative, innovative, and unique within the discipline of music theory.The importance of this work does not reside in the presentation of a new set of theoretical tools for exploring serial music, but rather in providing a new conceptual framework for comprehending large-scale unity and coherence in Schoenberg's serial compositions.(1) At the start of the first chapter Boss establishes his theoretical framework by examining Schoenberg's concept of musical Idea as described in his writings and surveying some musical, philosophical, and historical antecedents, as well as modern scholars' works that have been influenced by the concept of the Idea-and in turn have influenced Boss himself.The remaining seven chapters include chronological (by opus number) in-depth analyses of complete works or movements from some of Schoenberg's most revered compositions, including Suite for Piano op. 25, Piano Piece op.33a, Moses und Aron, and the String Trio op.45.[2] The theoretical underpinnings of Boss's rigorous analytic survey of Schoenberg's serial works emerge from the composer's statement that "the only analysis there can be for me is one that throws the idea into relief and shows how it is presented and worked out" (1; Boss cites a letter from Schoenberg to Rudolf Kolisch, in Stein 1965, 164-65).Inspired by Schoenberg's desire for comprehensive analyses that trace the working out of a musical idea, Boss examines and adapts Schoenberg's concept of a tonally-based Idea-which contains three dialectic components (Grundgestalt, compositional problem, and solution)-and convincingly readapts it as a large-scale framework for examining long-range coherence within entire serial compositions or complete movements (7).(2) According to Boss's framework, a typical compositional problem Volume 21, Number 4, December 2015
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".