Schoenberg - three piano pieces

Glenn Gould playing Berg, Schoenberg, and Krenek.

I read about the Schoenberg pieces from a toot by John Carlos Baez, and wanted to listen to him after he was mentioned in this fabulous podcast episode on the Velvet Underground

There’s no clear beginning or end, no do for it to come back to. And Schoenberg’s great innovation, which he was only starting to promote widely around this time, was to insist that all twelve notes should be equal — his melodies would use all twelve of the notes the exact same number of times, and so if he used say a B flat, he would have to use all eleven other notes before he used B flat again in the piece.

This was a radical new idea, but Schoenberg had only started advancing it after first winning great acclaim for earlier pieces, like his “Three Pieces for Piano”, a work which wasn’t properly twelve-tone, but did try to do without the idea of having any one note be more important than any other

The author of that podcast draws a line from Cage -> Schoenberg -> Warhol -> La Monte Young -> John Cale -> Lou Reed -> Velvet Underground.

The episode is a masterpiece, and if you can see yourself enjoying a three hour course, with music breaks, on how that line played out, definitely give it a listen.