Schoenberg's Correspondence with American Composers is the first edition of all known and available letters between Arnold Schoenberg and over seventy American composers written between 1915 and 1951, in English and English translation and with commentary. In six chronologically organized chapters, the correspondence first casts new light on Schoenberg's contacts with American composers before 1933, including correspondence with students and champions of his music (Israel Amter, James Francis Cooke, Henry Cowell, Edgar Varèse, and Adolph Weiss among others). The letters after 1933 show how Schoenberg gradually built a network of composer colleagues and friends, among them Mark Brunswick, Oscar Levant, Roger Sessions, Nicolas Slonimsky, Gerald Strang, with whom he discussed compositional ideas, specific musical works and writings, performances and the publication of his compositions. These letters also provide insight into his ideas about teaching in private settings, at the Malkin Conservatory and the University of California. The correspondence of his last years illuminates how the reception of Schoenberg's music in the United States was flourishing and how he attracted a growing number of disciples exploring twelve-tone composition. The book also qualifies the concept of and Schoenberg's association with the Second Viennese School. Schoenberg's Correspondence with American Composers not only illuminates a varied and vivid epistolary style, but clearly demonstrates Schoenberg's far-reaching connections in the American music world.

A fresh perspective on two well-known personalities, Schoenberg's Correspondence with Alma Mahler documents a modern music friendship beginning in fin-de-siécle Vienna and ending in 1950s Los Angeles. This volume is the first English-language edition of the complete extant correspondence in new English translations from the original German, many from new transcriptions of handwritten originals, and it is the first English-language book of Schoenberg's correspondence with a female associate. These often quite candid letters afford readers a fascinating glimpse into the personalities, ideologies, institutions, protocols, and aesthetics of early twentieth-century European music culture. Critics, conductors, composers, and visual artists are appraised, kindly or venomously; visual artists and writers also appear. Above all, Alma Mahler (1879-1964) and Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) emerge as intriguing, complex individuals who transcend their conventional representations as, respectively, a femme fatale and a musical radical. For Schoenberg, Alma was a sympathetic confidante, a comrade in their shared battle against musical conservatism, yet also a canny negotiator of Vienna's social circles, a skill that brought Schoenberg into contact with important patrons. Not only did he invite Alma to his premieres, lectures, and art exhibitions, but Schoenberg also sent her scores of his music and drafts of his writings. He revealed to her his plans for his innovative new music society, the Society for Private Music Performances, and his development of a new method of composition with twelve tones. The letters remind us of how crucial the social and personal dimensions of music culture were to the early twentieth-century composers and musicians. Gender, ethnicity, and social class conditioned their opportunities in music---and in life---and their shared experience of fleeing fascism to a new country with a different culture and language resonates with our own epoch.

The volume is the first edition of all known and available letters between Arnold Schoenberg and over seventy American composers, written between 1915 and 1951 in English and English translation and with commentary. It includes numerous unknown letters and casts new light on Schoenberg's American years, his American composers colleagues and his life and works in the United States. The book qualifies the concept of, and Schoenberg's association with, the Second Viennese School and reveals hitherto unknown aspects of Schoenberg's biography.

And Copland in the late 1920s, when they decided to organize a series of concerts of new music in New York City. The volume also contains previously unpublished letters between Sessions and Thomas Mann on Mann's Dr. Faustus and letters from Ernst Krenek that vividly describe his escape from the Nazis and adjustment to life in America. Until now, many details about Sessions's life and work have been elusive. Here Sessions discusses the range of musical issues that touched.