Schoenberg and Hollywood Modernism

Schoenberg is often viewed as an isolated composer who was ill-at-ease in exile. In this book Kenneth H. Marcus shows that in fact Schoenberg's connections to Hollywood ran deep, and most of the composer's exile compositions had some connection to the cultural and intellectual environment in which he found himself. He was friends with numerous successful film industry figures, including George Gershwin, Oscar Levant, David Raksin and Alfred Newman, and each contributed to the composer's life and work in different ways: helping him to obtain students, making recordings of his music, and arranging commissions. While teaching at both the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles, Schoenberg was able to bridge two utterly different worlds: the film industry and the academy. Marcus shows that alongside Schoenberg's vital impact upon Southern California Modernism through his pedagogy, compositions and texts, he also taught students who became central to American musical modernism, including John Cage and Lou Harrison.

Introduction; Part I. Modernism in Southern California, 1913–44: 1. Early Modernism in Southern California, 1913–33; 2. Hollywood and exile; 3. The road to Westwood: from USC to UCLA; Part II. The Private and Public Spheres, 1936–51: 4. The private world of Schoenberg; 5. Judaism revisited: Schoenberg's Jewish works; 6. War, nationalism, and anticommunism; 7. Troubles in paradise: the final years; Conclusion; Appendices: 1. List of works in exile, 1934–50; 2. Text to Arnold Schoenberg, Kol Nidre, Op. 39; 3. Text to Arnold Schoenberg, A Survivor from Warsaw, Op. 46; 4. Text to Arnold Schoenberg, Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, Op. 41 by Lord Byron; 5. Bertolt Brecht, letter and poem, 'Und in eurem Lande?', to Arnold Schoenberg for his 68th birthday (1942).

Kenneth H. Marcus is Professor of History and Chair of the International Studies Program at the University of La Verne, California. An historian, musician and composer, he has published over forty articles, book chapters, encyclopedia entries and book reviews, and has recorded CDs of music for piano, guitar, voice, and organ. His two previous books are Musical Metropolis: Los Angeles and the Creation of a Music Culture, 1880–1940 (2004) and Politics of Power: Elites of an Early Modern State in Germany (2000). In spring 2013, he was Fulbright Senior Professor in American Culture at Leiden University, the Netherlands.