A note in the score for Kaija Saariaho's NoaNoa (1992), a piece for flute, prerecorded sounds, and real-time processing, points to the remarkable degree to which electro-acoustic music is embedded in the specific moment and technologies of its creation. Saariaho composed NoaNoa at IRCAM (Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics and Music at the Pompidou Center, Paris) using its extensive computer music resources for analyzing and modeling instrumental timbre, reverberation, and spatial effects. After a description of all the gear required for a performance (processors, controllers, a Midi interface, Max/MSP patches, and a “Macintosh PowerPC with CD-Rom drive [compatible with system 7.1 or higher]”), she writes: “The technical information given above is correct as of September 1998, but the performer should contact the publisher for updates.”

We were once accustomed to think of the “Historical Performance Practice” movement in terms of, for example, violinists' extreme efforts to play eighteenth-century pieces with what they regarded as an appropriate technique, period bow, strings, and even an instrument with the right varnish and glue. But in contrast to the decades or even centuries we use to measure changes associated with the musical technology of the violin, with NoaNoa we see a composer compelled to indicate a specific month; the implication is that whatever hardware and software she had originally employed could be obsolete by October.

This Cambridge Companion provides an introduction to the central works, writings, and ideas of Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951). Few would challenge the contention that Schoenberg is one of the most important figures in twentieth-century music, though whether his ultimate achievement or influence is for good or ill is still hotly debated. There are those champions who regard as essential his works, theories, and signature ideas such as “the emancipation of the dissonance,” and “composition with twelve tones related only to one another,” just as there are numerous critics who would cite precisely the same evidence to argue that Schoenberg is responsible for having led music astray.

No doubt many readers will take up this volume with some measure of trepidation; for concertgoers, students, and musicians, the name Schoenberg can still carry a certain negative charge. And while the music of other early modernist twentieth-century composers who have preceded Schoenberg into the ranks of the Cambridge Companions – including Debussy, Bartók, Stravinsky, and even Schoenberg's pupil Alban Berg – could be regarded as having achieved something of a state of artistic normalcy, Schoenberg's music for many remains beyond the pale. It is not our purpose here to bring Schoenberg in from the cold or to make him more accessible by showing that the alleged difficulty, obscurity, fractiousness, and even unlovability of his music are mistaken. On the contrary, much of his music – indeed almost all of his creative output, be it theoretical, literary, or in the visual arts – could be characterized to some degree as oppositional, critical, and unafraid of provoking discomfort.

Schoenberg's interest in chords and melodies using all twelve tones emerged as early as 1910 during the composition of his opera Die glückliche Hand, Op. 18 (1910–13) and as he was writing the final chapters of his Theory of Harmony (1910–11). The sketches for his unfinished choral symphony, which he started in 1914, include a twelve-tone row and its transformations. During the years of World War I, and then more systematically in 1920–23, he experimented with ordered and unordered collections of various lengths, using a technique he described as “working with tones of the motif,” in works and fragments including Die Jakobsleiter, the Five Pieces for Piano, Op. 23, and the Serenade, Op. 24. The Suite for Piano, Op. 25 (completed in 1923 and published in 1925) is the first piece to use twelve-tone techniques throughout, while the Wind Quintet, Op. 26 (1924) was the first to use a single row for all the movements. And though he never stopped writing tonal music, the project of exploring the manifold ramifications and possibilities of the “method of composing with twelve tones related only to one another” remained at the center of his creative life for the next twenty-seven years.

In contrast to his extensive writings on tonal theory, however, Schoenberg wrote very little concerning the details of twelve-tone composition. The essay “Composition with Twelve Tones,” published a year before his death in the first edition of Style and Idea (1950), was his most substantial public statement. As a result, we primarily owe our understanding of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method to the work of three generations of composers, historians, and theorists who have produced an extraordinary body of scholarship and new compositions formalizing and extending Schoenberg’s ideas. These developments have necessarily brought with them considerable standardization in the pedagogy of twelve-tone theory and analysis. While some differences still persist, the adoption of a shared terminology, conceptual framework, and conventions of representation, have led to an ease of communication between scholars and composers and thus to the flourishing of what has become an important discipline in the field.

Of all the new musical developments in the years following the First World War, none has been entangled in more controversy than the claim made by Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and Alban Berg that their music, and ‘the method of composing with twelve tones related only to one another’ on which much of it was based (otherwise known as serialism), represented the culmination of the mainstream of the Austro-German tradition and thus, by implication, of the mainstream of music in general. All three composers maintained that theirs was the one true path, and drew on historical, national, and even metaphysical arguments to justify their claims. Schoenberg’s ‘National Music’ (1931) traced his lineage from Bach and Mozart, through Beethoven, Wagner, and Brahms, concluding, ‘I venture to credit myself with having written truly new music, which being based on tradition, is destined to become tradition’. In a series of lectures from 1932–3, Webern pushed the origins of ‘The Path to Twelve-Tone Composition’ back past the Netherlanders all the way to Gregorian chant; insisting on the historical inevitability and necessity of twelve-tone composition, he charted a progression from the breakdown of the system of the church modes, through to Wagner’s chromatic harmony, the end of tonality, and finally to twelve-tone composition, writing, ‘It’s my belief that ever since music has been written, all the great composers have instinctively had this before them as a goal.’