The Catalan cellist Pablo Casals, reputed to have “discovered” J. S. Bach’s Cello Suites, is better understood as their most influential popularizer. Through his extensive concert tours in the early twentieth century and culminating in his complete recording of the cycle in the 1930s, he solidified their place in concert life and established paradigms that remain influential today. Among these are the practice of only performing complete suites, with all repeats and without piano accompaniment. Casals’s exile to Prades, France, in protest of Franco’s dictatorship, abruptly ended his concert career and established Casals as a humanitarian figure, inspiring later generations of cellists who used the Cello Suites to advocate for peace and an end to human suffering. Examples include Mstislav Rostropovich’s impromptu performance after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Yo-Yo Ma’s performance at the US-Mexico border and outside the Russian embassy, and Denys Karachevtsev’s performance on the heavily bombed-out streets of Kharkiv. Cellists have recently experimented with playing the Cello Suites in unusual venues such as subways, mountaintops, and in community settings worldwide. The Cello Suites’ global resonance is evinced by the wide range of art and popular media they have inspired.

Although numerous books and articles have examined Arnold Schoenberg’s religious thought, fewer have taken a close look at his core philosophical orientation. This chapter explores the composer’s philosophical milieu, musings and influences. Thinkers who began to set new coordinates for the new century sought to abolish the brand of metaphysics that had dominated German philosophy throughout the nineteenth century. While remnants of dialectical metaphysics were still circulating in Schoenberg’s Vienna, the cosmology it presupposed was rapidly fading out of fashion. This chapter traces Schoenberg’s philosophical alignment with the new ‘scientific worldview’ of proto-logical positivist Ernst Mach, his student David Joseph Bach (Schoenberg’s lifelong friend) and Schoenberg’s composition student Robert Neumann, an active member of the Vienna Circle (originally the Verein Ernst Mach).

The overabundance of examples in Schoenberg’s textbooks can often be overwhelming. When one solution might have sufficed to illustrate a particular concept, Schoenberg offered many. It was not uncommon for him to compose multiple alternative endings and ossia measures for a single solution, often devoid of aesthetic evaluation, and sometimes of explanatory text altogether. Readers of his texts are familiar with this quirk, but what was the point of such tireless exploration? Schoenberg believed that, through this systematic exploration of possibility, his students would gain the tools necessary to grapple with the unique problems of their own musical ideas. In turn, this emphasis on self-reliance and possibility fostered precisely the stylistic and creative diversity that we find among Schoenberg’s students, from Anton Webern to John Cage. Schoenberg’s emphasis on possibility encouraged a diverse pedagogical legacy that includes film composers, serialists, music theorists and even a composer who late in life saw no contradiction in adding punk rock performance to her résumé.

Though it goes against the common conception of Schoenberg as a no-nonsense adherent to high art and modernism, popular music played an important role in the composer’s life and work. This chapter will survey Schoenberg’s engagement with the popular music and popular-music culture by focusing on four dimensions of that engagement: Schoenberg’s early-period cabaret songs; the use of popular music in his mature works before 1933; his relationship to popular music while living in Los Angeles; and the role of popular music in Schoenberg’s theories.

Starting from the Russo-Japanese War until the height of the Cold War era, Schoenberg’s adult life coincided with various wars during the turbulent first half of the twentieth century. This chapter explores how Schoenberg navigated these events by surveying his correspondences with friends and pupils, his own writings and brief analyses of two overtly political compositions, Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, op. 41 (1942) and A Survivor from Warsaw, op. 46 (1947). This chapter ends by considering the two war compositions as the composer’s statement and restatement against fascistic tendencies in Germany during World War II and, again, in the United States during the Cold War era.

This chapter, concerned with earliness as an aesthetic category, elicits a productive tension between Webern’s fascination for the ‘purely phenomenological’ dimensions of new-symbolist poetry and Jugendstil architecture on the one hand, and the impact Schoenberg’s ‘dialectic-material’ musical thought had on him as a student on the other – a tension that had crystallised as essentially irreconcilable in fin de siècle philosophical discourse yet in many ways formed the matrix through which much of Webern’s compositional imagination was shaped. From this perspective, it is argued that there is a need to reorient discussion of the works Webern produced under Schoenberg’s tutelage, from questions concerned with style towards a more comprehensive understanding of the ways in which the new stylistic means and devices Webern encountered during his studies with Schoenberg enabled the young composer to (re)voice his concern for presence and immediacy.