What Am I Reading Now?

Yeah, and who cares, right? That's what I usually think when I see a title like that. Sure, 90% of the time it is just bragging or virtue-signaling, and it probably is this time too. But I am reading some interesting stuff right now. For example:

• Perspectives on Schoenberg and Stravinsky, ed. Benjamin Boretz and Edward T. Cone. This is a book that I used to have and just recently replaced. Delighted it is still in print. The essays are taken from the journal Perspectives of New Music, a journal first published by Princeton, now by an independent corporation. Its focus has always been on theoretical aspects of new music. I am a bit surprised to see it is still being published. The glory days were undoubtedly the 60s and 70s from when these essays originated. I just read the first essay by Robert Craft on Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 16, written in 1964 or thereabouts. This was almost fifty years after the pieces were composed in 1909. Of course now we are another fifty years later and it may almost be time for these pieces to find an audience! Re the last piece Craft writes:

"I have come across six identical descriptions of this piece (Das Obligate Rezitativ)--such is the vis inertiae of music commentators (and the taedium vitae of their readers)--but failed to learn any more from them than that the listener is faced with an "example of the free chromatic idiom"; as if there were anything free about it, and as if idioms for this sort of thing were to be found lying about ready-made. But I can do little better myself; and I am running out of those escape clauses which are making my account of the music read like an insurance policy. I lack the tools to verbalize the logic which I have no trouble in following with my ears..."

Well, they don't write music theory like that any more. Especially with Latin tags.

• A History of Opera: The Last Four Hundred Years by Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker. I'm reading this to fill in a shocking hiatus in my music education. I'm not sure why they say "The Last Four Hundred Years" as the first operas that we recognize as such were composed by Monteverdi and a couple of other Italians around 1600. Were they planning a volume two titled "The Four Hundred Years Prior to the Last Four Hundred Years"?
• The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, by Umberto Eco. This is a surprisingly accessible book on an area of aesthetics that I am almost entirely ignorant of. Is Beauty a transcendental property of Being like Goodness and Truth? Well you may ask!

I'm also reading some light fiction, but I will spare you the details. But we really need to listen to the Five Pieces for Orchestra by Schoenberg. They are like music history distilled down to its essence...

First a live concert: Haitink conducting the Vienna Philharmonic:

Second, with the score. I think this is Robert Craft conducting the London Symphony:

UPDATE: No, this really isn't atonal music.