Chapter 7 reviews the arguments presented throughout the whole book, reminding the reader that my portrayal of Schoenberg’s atonal music as connected by common frameworks such as “musical idea” and “basic image” goes against the grain of much previous Schoenberg scholarship. It argues against the idea that each piece creates its own unique organization (the concept of “contextual atonality”) and also against the notion that Schoenberg went through a phase in 1909–11 where he abandoned motives and motivic process. But if the atonal music can be understood as a logical, continuous development with its pieces linked by common frameworks, how can one justify Schoenberg’s turn to 12-tone music in the 1920s? The latter part of my chapter explains the transition as motivated by two factors (with analysis of selected pieces): the desire for regular circulation through the 12-tone aggregate, and the need for complete control over all pitch classes of the piece through transformation of the Grundgestalt.

Chapter 2 demonstrates how the second and third Piano Pieces of Op. 11 form a cycle together with the first, in that they take up motives, harmonies, and processes that were introduced in the first piece, and use them to create narratives of conflict, elaboration, and solution – “musical ideas.” Op. 11’s processes include an expansion of pitch intervals within motives that generalizes into an expansion of pitch-class intervals within set classes, and an “explanatory” process that shows how unfamiliar pitch-interval collections can be reconciled to familiar motives through set-class identity with them. In Op. 11, No. 2, a conflict between set classes and motives similar to the one found in Op. 11, No. 1, is elaborated and resolved using the “explanatory” process, among other devices. In Op. 11, No. 3, the expanding and explanatory processes exist side by side in conflict, but rather than coming together in a solution, the expanding process simply crowds out the explanatory one, so that the “musical idea” is incomplete. My analysis of Op. 11, No. 3, pushes back against the common notion of the piece as “athematic,” in that it portrays the piece as a battle of motivic processes.