The spikey, angular music sometimes called "12-tone music" invented by Arnold Schoenberg remains a challenge to the ears of many listeners today. But before Schoenberg turned away from traditional ...

Among several historic musical anniversaries celebrated this year—including the centenary of “Rhapsody in Blue”—an easily overlooked one especially deserves mention, since it marked an artistic ...

For Italian Composer Luigi Dallapiccola, 57, life has by his own testimony been “one long suffer.” The suffer is apparent in the spare, abrasively powerful twelve-tone music that has flowed steadily ...

American composer George Perle, a respected theorist, teacher, author and eloquent advocate for atonal music, died at his home in Manhattan Friday, Jan. 23. He was 93. Although Perle embraced the ...

Could any two composers be more different than Johann Strauss II and Arnold Schoenberg? Strauss wrote jolly waltzes and polkas. Schoenberg was a prophet of modernity, the exponent of atonality and ...

In Italian musical circles, short, homely Composer Luigi Dallapiccola is affectionately known as Il Bruttino—The Ugly One. For some Italian critics, the name also applies to his dodecafonico music. In ...