Chapter 3 turns its attention to the “Book of the Hanging Gardens” songs, Op. 15 – some of Schoenberg’s earliest atonal pieces. As settings of texts by Stefan George, these songs illustrate the large framework I call “basic image.” A basic image distills a visual shape of some sort from the poem’s first few lines of text, then uses it to control various aspects of the song’s pitch and rhythm. In Op. 15, No. 7, “Angst und Hoffen,” the basic image is of a lover turning his face alternately upward toward hope and downward toward fear (that his beloved would be lost to him), while his body first constricts, then expands to emit longer and longer sighs. In Op. 15, No. 11, “Als wir hinter dem beblümten Tore,” the guiding image is that of a memory (of a past tryst with the beloved) in the lover’s mind that disappears, but is at least partially recovered after some striving. This second image has points in common with the other kind of framework, the “musical idea.”

In Chapter 5, the Six Little Piano Pieces of Op. 19 are portrayed as a step in the direction of clear and traditional musical form, and more audible motivic processes, after the more abrupt forms and less obvious motivic relations (though far from non-existent) of Op. 11, No. 3, and Erwartung. I describe Pieces No. 2, 3, and 6 in detail, showing that these miniatures are organized by the same frameworks, “musical idea” and “basic image,” as previous works analysed in the book. Piece No. 2 manifests a musical idea that grows out of a conflict between hexatonic, octatonic, and whole-tone subsets, in which the hexatonic emerges victorious over the other two. Piece No. 3 expresses an “idea” of the same kind, but at the last minute the hexatonic collection’s ability to synthesize is thwarted by diatonic subsets. And piece No. 6, the famous portrayal of Mahler’s funeral bells, portrays an image of Schoenberg reaching up to take Mahler’s mantle as tonal composer, but falling back down into first pandiatonic territory and then chromaticism.