Award-winning author Jack Boss returns with the 'prequel' to Schoenberg's Twelve-Tone Music (Cambridge, 2014) demonstrating that the term 'atonal' is meaningful in describing Schoenberg's music from 1908 to 1921.

This book shows how Schoenberg's atonal music can be understood in terms of successions of pitch and rhythmic motives and pitch-class sets that flesh out the large frameworks of 'musical idea' and 'basic image'.

It also explains how tonality, after losing its structural role in ...