This chapter uses music analysis to understand two different strategies for unfolding musical material from initial ideas, one by Debussy and the other by Schoenberg. This approach considers how pieces might be formed from a small fragment of musical ‘DNA’ for a composer to expand, before looking further to understand this process of ‘unfolding’ are shaped by different aesthetic, cultural and historical conditions.

The concept of serialism appears conspicuously in the academic literature on twentieth-century music in technical, theoretical, and philosophical contexts. These various contexts, expressed over the course of much of the twentieth century, expose differing connotations of the serial concept. Part I of this chapter explores the serial concept before 1945, reflecting on the multi-dimensional origins of the concept in Arnold Schoenberg’s earliest serial compositions and the significance of Olivier Messiaen’s distinctive serial conceptions prior to the Second World War. Part II explores the serial movement in Europe after 1945, the prominent roles of the journal Die Reihe and the Darmstadt New Music Courses, and the contrasting approaches and attitudes to serialism in the United States after 1945. Tensions between rupture and continuity on both sides of the Atlantic and divergent priorities in discourse about new music demonstrate that theorising serialism entails an understanding of its dynamic disposition, instability, and impermanence.

The accident of parentage; impinging cultural, social, and political forces; unbidden encounters, events, and opportunities: these are not under a composer’s control, but can have a momentous impact on personal and compositional development. Consequence is not, however, inevitable. So for those trying to gain insight into a composer’s world, his or her decision-making is more important than mere factual circumstance: how they respond to the environment of which they are a part, and, not least, the myriad decisions undertaken in the creation of a compositional persona and in the course of actual composition. This chapter surveys the compositional environment in which Britten made his entrance. It took Britten a while to find the most powerful and ambitious means of employing simplicity, in pursuit of a complexity formed from the density and quality of relationships rather than the mere overlaying, entanglement, or busyness of complicatedness. This quest is traced with reference to some key works, while noting that Britten’s eclecticism refreshes a strong individual voice to the end of his career.

Thomas Adès’s piano concerto In Seven Days (2008) outlines the biblical creation story in seven connected movements, merging the figurative and the abstract to parallel modern allegorical readings of Genesis 1:2. This capacious model of musical growth and transformation will include the development of a vast tonal edifice from two primary harmonies, reference the birth of the modern orchestra and repurpose traditional compositional techniques from the Renaissance to the present. But In Seven Days embraces a meta-musical role as well, through allusions to select works that have broached the subject of creation. As the composer avers, it tells ‘the story of the material and also of “material”, all of it, in the world’ writ large, as a musical paradigm of world-building that draws on medieval, Baroque and contemporary compositional techniques to recover the inexhaustible promise of the musical past.

This chapter considers the reception of Mahler by Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, with particular attention to parallel threads of interpretation. On one hand, the triumvirate championed their idol with determination and perseverance, to make a place for him in the centuries-long progression of Western compositional history and to establish as the culmination of this history (at least provisionally) their own works, with Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method as its most advanced expression. But another, backward-looking Second Viennese interpretation of Mahler’s music existed from the beginning: as the last manifestation of a musical paradise eternally closed to subsequent composers, who, unlike Mahler, rejected the commandment to leave tonality intact. As self-styled heirs, then, the Second Viennese School faced an irresolvable dilemma: their succession through an initially “atonal” and then dodecaphonic language required the destruction of this paradise, which existed on a tonal foundation.

Richard Strauss’s contacts with Vienna spanned more than six decades, from the time of his brief stint as a university student in 1882 through the Allied air campaigns of 1944. This chapter focuses on the city of Vienna during the period of Strauss’s tenure as codirector of the State Opera from 1919–24, years defined by the founding of the First Austrian Republic and policies instituted by the Municipal Council in response to ongoing economic turmoil. While the situation was less dire than in Berlin, Vienna was nonetheless a city in crisis when Strauss arrived in early December 1919. Examination of “Red Vienna,” named for initiatives of the ruling Social Democratic Party, serves as context for the cultural life in which he participated as a well-respected and well-paid musical celebrity. Attention then shifts to Strauss’s life and work in Vienna with an emphasis on the institutions and figures comprising his private and professional orbit.

The chapter specifically explores the Futurist aesthetics of noise as manifested in Luigi Russolo’s ‘noise machines,’ or ‘intonarumori.’ Noise, and composition with noises, folds in with the Futurists’ general affirmation of technological modernity and with their related aesthetic practices extolling the virtues of speed, violence and war. The chapter also ponders Futurist noise and its relationship to twelve-tone dissonance, and discovers a common spiritualist thread linking these musical formal practices. For Russolo, at least, the technical and spiritualist connections relate to Leonardo da Vinci’s own plans for music machines, and his general view art’s ‘spirituality.’

Within a decade of Brahms’s compositions first appearing in print, supporters and proponents began subjecting his music to analysis. From that time onward, commentators across the centuries have continued to scrutinise his compositions, exploring both structural elements (motifs, harmonies, counterpoint, rhythm and form) and the relationship between structure and meaning. Over time, the theoretical frameworks behind these analyses have changed, as have the broader aesthetic and scholarly environments [see Ch. 16 ‘Genre’]. Nevertheless, the origins of some of the more influential analytical approaches can be traced back to Brahms’s contemporaries. This essay will focus on the work emanating from three of the most influential theoretical schools, those inspired by Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), Heinrich Schenker (1868–1935) and Hugo Riemann (1849–1919).

The reception of Brahms’s music beyond his home city of Hamburg began in 1853, when the young composer made his first extended journey and presented his compositions to some of the leading figures of German contemporary music: Robert Schumann, Robert Franz and Franz Liszt. Each reacted to these unpublished works in distinctive ways.

Robert Schumann, with whom Brahms spent the whole month of October in Düsseldorf,was instantly enthralled.