The Lessons of Arnold Schoenberg in Teaching the Musikalische Gedanke
THE LESSONS OF ARNOLD SCHOENBERG IN TEACHING THE MUSIKALISCHE GEDANKE Colleen Marie Conlon, B.A., M.M. Dissertation Prepared for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS May 2009 APPROVED: Graham Phipps, Major Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the College of Music Margaret Notley, Minor Professor Thomas Sovik, Committee Member Eileen Hayes, Interim Chair of the Division of Music History, Theory, and Ethnomusicology James C. Scott, Dean of the College of Music Michael Monticino, Interim Dean of the Robert B. Toulouse School of Graduate Studies Conlon, Colleen Marie. The Lessons of Arnold Schoenberg in Teaching the Musikalische Gedanke. Doctor of Philosophy (Music Theory), May 2009, 187 pp., 6 tables, 14 illustrations, 38 musical examples, references, 124 titles. Arnold Schoenberg’s teaching career spanned over fifty years and included experiences in Austria, Germany, and the United States. Schoenberg’s teaching assistant, Leonard Stein, transcribed Schoenberg’s class lectures at UCLA from 1936 to 1944. Most of these notes resulted in publications that provide pedagogical examples of combined elements from Schoenberg’s European years of teaching with his years of teaching in America. There are also class notes from Schoenberg’s later lectures that have gone unexamined. These notes contain substantial examples of Schoenberg’s later theories with analyses of masterworks that have never been published. Both the class notes and the subsequent publications reveal Schoenberg’s comprehensive approach to understanding the presentation of the Gedanke or musical idea. In his later classes especially, Schoenberg demonstrated a method of analyzing musical compositions using illustrations of elements of the Grundgestalt or “basic shape,” which contains the technical aspects of the musical parts.
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