© 2003 by Oxford University Press
Taste, Power, and Trying to Understand Op. 36: British Attempts to Popularize Schoenberg
1 St John's College, Oxford
From the late 1950s onwards, significant parts of the British musical establishment became involved in vigorous proselytizing activity on behalf of the later work of Arnold Schoenberg. Over the next three decades, as many as half a dozen distinguished British writers on music produced books devoted to the explanation of this difficult repertory to non-specialist audiences, books that have become only too familiar to generations of students taking compulsory courses on the Second Viennese School. Employing a variety of sociological and analytical methods, I provide close readings both of these texts and of key passages from that most intractable and unloved of Schoenberg's serial compositions, the Violin Concerto, Op. 36. The aim is to deliver a thorough critique of the ideological presuppositions informing British attempts to popularize music of this kind, attempts that can now safely be said to have failed.