SMT-V

In 1951, Schoenberg received a letter from composer Humphrey Searle asking Schoenberg to record a lecture for the BBC radio program “Music Magazine.” Schoenberg immediately proposed a subject, “Advice for Beginners in Composition with Twelve-Tones,” and requested to use television rather than radio because his musical examples “were perhaps less easily to realize by the ear than by the eye.” Although Schoenberg wrote a script, he died before he could record it. Only recently has this fascinating document been published, providing keen insights into Schoenberg’s compositional process, and posing interesting questions about the reception of twelve-tone composition after his death.