SHAWN, Allen [Charles Strouse].
Arnold Schoenberg's Journey
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux , 2002.
$125.00
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Item Number: RRB-152214
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First Edition of Allen Shawn's Arnold Schoenberg's Journey; From the Collection of Broadway Composer Charles Strouse
First edition of this acclaimed portrait of the composer Arnold Schoenberg by composer and pianist Allen Shawn. Octavo, original publisher's half cloth, illustrated with music stanzas and black-and-white photographs. From the collection of Tony, Grammy, and Emmy Award-winning composer Charles Strouse and his wife, choreographer Barbara Siman. Over his 50-year career, Charles Strouse wrote the music for such iconic musical theater hits as Bye Bye Birdie, Applause, and Annie, as well as the theme song for the classic sitcom All in the Family (“Those Were the Days”). His partnership with Martin Charnin on Annie produced one of Broadway’s most successful scores ever, with “Tomorrow” becoming a standard. His reach knew no genre or generation – from a number-one Billboard hit in 1958 to Jay-Z’s Grammy-winning sampling of “It’s the Hard-Knock Life” four decades later – and his honors include three Tony Awards and induction into both the Songwriters and Theater Halls of Fame. With his ownership stamp to the front free endpaper. Fine in a near fine dust jacket. Designed by Debbie Glasserman. Jacket design by Anne Fink.
Composer and pianist Allen Shawn—a longtime member of the music faculty at Bennington College and later the author of a well-received biography of Leonard Bernstein—approaches Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) not as a forbidding theorist but as one of the most consequential and misunderstood figures in twentieth-century music. In a series of linked, essayistic chapters written largely from the listener’s point of view, Shawn traces Schoenberg’s astonishing evolution from the lush late-Romanticism of Verklärte Nacht through the free atonality of Pierrot Lunaire to the twelve-tone method that would reshape modern composition, all while situating him within the cultural ferment of fin-de-siècle Vienna, his parallel gifts as a painter among the Expressionists, and the upheavals of exile that carried him from Europe to Los Angeles. Drawing on the music itself, Schoenberg’s own writings, and the testimony of those around him, Shawn makes a humane and persuasive case for the emotional logic behind even the composer’s most demanding scores. Widely praised on publication, Arnold Schoenberg’s Journey received the 2003 ASCAP Deems Taylor Award and remains among the most accessible and sympathetic introductions to its subject.
Arnold Schoenberg's Journey
$125.00
In Stock
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