Structural Functions of Harmony - Tapa blanda

First published in 1948, this is Schoenberg's final theoretical work. It is the last of a series of basic texts which Schoenberg compiled for his composition students at the University of California. The opening chapters are a resume of the basic principles of the early "Theory of Harmony". The subsequent chapters demonstrate the concept of 'monotonality'. Using the music of composers from Bach to Beethoven to Schoenberg himself, Schoenberg analyses modulations between keys not in relation to each other, but as shifts to different 'regions' of the tonic, the central tonality. "Structural Functions of Harmony" provides a key to the development of musical structure during the last two hundred and fifty years.