The current issue of the Journal of the Arnold Schönberg Center is being published as an open access journal.
Now Online: Journal of the Arnold Schönberg Center 19/2024
Fifty years ago, on the occasion of the Schönberg centenary celebrations, the Internationale Schönberg-Gesellschaft organized its first Congress in Vienna, which was followed by further conferences in 1984 and 1993. The resulting publications, released in 1978, 1986, and 1996 by the Verlag Lafite in Vienna, provided an unprecedented overview of international Schönberg research. The Arnold Schönberg Center Privatstiftung, founded in 1997, prioritized specific themes for each issue of the Journal of the Arnold Schönberg Center, which was first published in 2000. Spanning a period of fifteen years, the journal addressed aspects of Schönberg's life, work, and corresponding contexts, some of which had received little attention until then: these were examined in detail and discussed on a broad basis in symposia and associated reports. With the International Arnold Schönberg Symposium 2014, the Center continued the tradition of the ISG Congresses and largely dispensed with overarching themes. The subsequent volumes covered a broad spectrum of current research projects, ranging from analyses of individual works and historical issues to the wider context of Schönberg and his circle of students.
Arnold Schönberg's 150th birthday in 2024 marks the starting point for a new beginning, which not only takes into account an increasing trend in the academic world, but is also a logical evolution in terms of the journal’s international orientation. For future volumes, the decision was made to dispense with a physical format and continue the series as an open access journal.
As part of the freely accessible online publication of the Journal of the Arnold Schönberg Center, which begins with this issue, we are pleased to announce our cooperation with musiconn.publish, a service of the DFG-funded musicology information service musiconn, which is jointly operated by the BSB Munich and the SLUB Dresden, and is part of the international Open Access movement. musiconn.publish provides free electronic publication, verification, and long-term archiving of musicological literature. Persistent identifiers ensure that the published documents can be cited and clearly referenced. The platform guarantees high visibility through indexing in the central subject bibliographies and reference systems as well as worldwide free availability independent of library licenses.
The current issue opens with Reinhard Kapp‘s article on Arnold Schönberg's choral works, which encompass a period ranging from the composer's beginnings to his last creative phase. Meike Wilfing-Albrecht examines “Die glückliche Hand” op.18, a “Drama mit Musik” (drama with music), in the context of contemporary lighting and stage technology. The contributions by Benjamin Levy and Matthew Vest are based on lectures given during past online symposia at the Center. Levy discusses the transfer of aphoristic expression from literature to music, while Vest searches for traces of Arnold Schönberg's now largely unknown pupil Ernst Bachrich. The journal concludes with an extensive contribution by Pamela Cooper-White, which re-examines the opera “Moses and Aron” from the perspective of Zionism and trauma research. A manuscript of Act III of the work, acquired by the Arnold Schönberg Center in 2002, is discussed in detail and published in English translation for the first time.
