Schoenberg's Harmonielehre

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. based on the 3rd edition University of California Press, Berkeley & Los Angeles. (Back to text)