Schoenberg's Correspondence with American Composers

Schoenberg's Correspondence with American Composers is the first edition of all known and available letters between Arnold Schoenberg and over seventy American composers written between 1915 and 1951, in English and English translation and with commentary. In six chronologically organized chapters, the correspondence first casts new light on Schoenberg's contacts with American composers before 1933, including correspondence with students and champions of his music (Israel Amter, James Francis Cooke, Henry Cowell, Edgar Varèse, and Adolph Weiss among others). The letters after 1933 show how Schoenberg gradually built a network of composer colleagues and friends, among them Mark Brunswick, Oscar Levant, Roger Sessions, Nicolas Slonimsky, Gerald Strang, with whom he discussed compositional ideas, specific musical works and writings, performances and the publication of his compositions. These letters also provide insight into his ideas about teaching in private settings, at the Malkin Conservatory and the University of California.

The correspondence of his last years illuminates how the reception of Schoenberg's music in the United States was flourishing and how he attracted a growing number of disciples exploring twelve-tone composition. The book also qualifies the concept of and Schoenberg's association with the Second Viennese School. Schoenberg's Correspondence with American Composers not only illuminates a varied and vivid epistolary style, but clearly demonstrates Schoenberg's far-reaching connections in the American music world.

Sabine Feisst is Professor of Music at Arizona State University. Focusing on twentieth and twenty-first century music studies, she published the monographs Der Begriff "Improvisation" in der neuen Musik (1997) and Schoenberg's New World: The American Years (2011) which won the Society for American Music's Lowens Award. With Ethan Haimo she published Schoenberg's Early Correspondence (2016) for the nine-volume set Schoenberg in Words (Oxford University Press), which she co-edits with Severine Neff.