“I have never worked harder in my life.” -Alban Berg, about composing his Violin Concerto Berg worked at a furious pace in composing his Violin Concerto, and the entire piece was finished in just a few months. He drove himself to keep working, ignoring his own health, his own pains, and at times even ignoring... Continue Reading →
To the Memory of an Angel, Part II
When composing music using Schoenberg’s serial methods, there is a great deal of preparatory, or “precompositional” work to be done. The twelve-tone technique has at its heart a pre-determined tone row. In brief, a proper twelve-tone row is an ordering of the twelve pitches of the chromatic scale, with no single note repeated in the... Continue Reading →