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Schoenberg and Redemption presents a new way of understanding Schoenberg's step into atonality in 1908. Reconsidering his threshold and early atonal works, as well as his theoretical writings and a range of previously unexplored archival documents, Julie Brown argues that Schoenberg's revolutionary step was in part a response to Wagner's negative charges concerning the Jewish influence on German music. In 1898 and especially 1908 Schoenberg's Jewish identity came into confrontation with his commitment to Wagnerian modernism to provide an impetus to his radical innovations. While acknowledging the broader turn-of-the-century Viennese context, Brown draws special attention to continuities between Schoenberg's work and that of Viennese moral philosopher Otto Weininger, himself an ideological Wagnerian. She also considers the afterlife of the composer's ideological position when, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the concept of redeeming German culture of its Jewish elements took a very different turn.

Chapter preview Music is an essential part of film and television, and yet it always competes for its place in the “soundtrack” with other sonic elements. What many would describe as the “soundtrack” in television and film therefore makes a slippery object of musicological study. Should we think of the music as functioning separately from sound effects and dialogue? If so, is this really justified by our twenty-first-century understanding of music? How does the sound element of sound cinema or screen-based multimedia fit into the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century music? This chapter traces some of the issues that film and television present to musicologists. Key issues What is music's role in film and television? Has it changed over the history of sound cinema and other screen forms? Does the relationship depend on the moving image practice involved? What approaches to the study of music in film and television have been adopted? Case study Let us start with a short sequence about an hour into Blade Runner: Director's Cut (1982), directed by Ridley Scott, with music by Vangelis. It is Los Angeles in 2019; former “blade runner” (policeman/assassin) Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) has been re-engaged to retire outlaw replicants (androids). Cut to Deckard's dark and dreary apartment: Deckard and Rachael (Sean Young) are present. Deckard's near-musical “roomtone” is established as a faint, low hum with a detectable pitch – a trilling motion from B to C. When Rachael reveals that she is herself a replicant, this is a cue for music – that is, “pit,” or nondiegetic music (Box 12.1).