I am here presenting the first few chapters from Roy Carter's English translation of Schoenberg's Harmonielehre 1. Nothing has been omitted; however, Schoenberg's sentences are full of parenthetical comments and subclauses, and so I have rearranged the text in a visual format that I feel makes his meaning easier to comprehend.
Altho Schoenberg's desire was to find a path for the development of new harmonic techniques within the confines of the 12-eq scale, I believe that the principles by which he unfolds his 'system of presentation' can be applied with great success to the development of an extended just-intonation or other type of microtonal compositional procedure.
As this project progresses, I will be adding commentary and diagrams around Schoenberg's text to further clarify or extrapolate. In particular, I wish to address the commentary of other authors, primarily those who have dealt with Schoenberg's ideas in a negative manner.
Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4
Schoenberg's later essay Problems of Harmony
1 |
Arnold Schoenberg, 1911. Harmonielehre
Universal Edition, Vienna. 3rd (revised) edition, 1922. English translation Theory of Harmony, Roy E. Carter, 1978.
(Back to text) |