Comment by mazelife

I’ve found Charles Rosen’s book _Arnold Schoenberg_ to be an excellent introduction to the composer. It’s a short, well-written book. Not so much a biography, as an exploration of the music and the various phases of the Schoenberg’s musical language; from the early tonal works, through free atonality, and finally serialism. And the most valuable part for me was the way in which it contextualized serialism in light of everything that had come before in western music, and some of what was to come after, and the way it presents it as a kind of an inevitability for Schoenberg. It’s not heavy on theory and people with only a cursory knowledge of music could get something out of it.