Essay by Salley on Music by Schoenberg Published in Music Theory Online
Coordinator of Music Theory and Associate Professor of Music Theory Keith Salley, Ph.D., will be published in the upcoming issue of Music Theory Online. His essay “Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Schoenberg’s Klavierstücke, op. 33a” discusses aural effects of combinatoriality and repetition in a relatively well-known serial work by the noted Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg. The essay proposes that in some ways, a listener’s processing of serial music — and combinatorial music especially — is analogous to the psycholinguistic phenomenon known as semantic satiation, and to a related sensation, the ‘verbal transformation effect.’
