Arnold Schoenberg

“Includes rare and revealing illustrations… [A] sane and sensitive biography… A readable illustrated biography of Schoenberg is such an obvious idea what one wonders why it has taken so long for one to appear. Certainly Phaidon’s 20th Century Composers series […] is an ideal format… Bojan Bujic […] has performed his task with skill and sympathy. It is refreshing to see Schoenberg treated as a passionate human being… Bujic’s explication of the serial method and its imaginative origins is sensible and concise… He is also ingenious in using his pictorial material to illuminate musical issues… Overall an extremely useful introduction.“—BBC Music

“The major (and rare) achievement of the book is its slow but sure description of Schoenberg’s move through post-romantic tonality, atonality and serialism. The explanation of musical language is always tricky […] but Bujic remains clear and honest without baffling. … particularly deft is his invitation to listen to Schoenberg in a different way. … Bujic’s biography, like its subject, dazzles and delights.“—Classical Music

“A considerable success – an overview that manages to be serious without ponderousness, fresh without superficiality … in Bujic’s hands there is always a degree of shrewdness to counter the dangers of over-simplification, boosted by a striking comparison or novel suggestion of context. … Bujic offers many […] deft characterisations of how to think constructively about his subject’s most challenging compositional concerns, and his narrative wears its own scholarship lightly.“—Musical Times

On the 20th Century Composers Series

“As a series, Phaidon’s 20th Century Composers has brought remarkable variety and a welter of information, both necessary and delightfully trivial. Intended both for the general reader and for the more enthusiastically musical.“—The Scotsman

Bojan Bujic (b.1937) studied English literature and Musicology in his native city of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, before completing his doctorate in fourteenth century music at Oxford. He has taught at the Academy of Music in Sarajevo, was a Lecturer in Music at the University of Reading and a Visiting Fellow at Cornell University. Since 1978, he has been a Lecturer in Music at Oxford University, and a Reader in Musicology since 1997. He is a Fellow of Magdalen College.

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