Name: Structural functions of harmony
ISBN: 9780571130009

Structural functions of harmony

This book is Schoenberg's last completed theoretical work and represents his final thoughts on the subject of classical and romantic harmony. The earlier chapters recapitulate in condensed form the principles laid down in his Theory of Harmony, the later chapters break entirely new ground, for they analyze the system of key relationships within the structure of whole movements and affirm the principle of "monotonality," showing how all modulations within a movement are merely deviations from, and not negations of, its main tonality. Schoenberg's argument is supported by music examples, which range from entire development sections of classical symphonies to analyses of the experimental harmonic progressions of Strauss, Debussy, Reger, and Schoenberg's own early music. The final chapter, "Apollonian Evaluation of a Dionysian Epoch," discusses the music of our time, with particular reference to the possibility of new methods of harmonic analysis.

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seanhunterSep 2026

This is (mostly) not music theory and what is music theory is mostly wrong or incomplete to the point of being wildly misleading. Source: have degree and postgrad in music, was a professional musician until RSI put paid to that career, wife is a professional musician and teaches to postgrad level at 2 conservertoires, most of our friends are professional musicians, have a house full of scores and music books.

If you actually want to learn music theory for the purposes of playing I strongly recommend you just follow whatever tutorials for your instrument and style and if you get to the point where feel you want to learn more and take it seriously in and of itself, buy “The Jazz Theory Book” by Mark Levine[1]. In spite of what it says, there really isn’t any such thing as Jazz theory - it’s just music theory, and this book is a great presentation with lots of good examples. If you like jazz (or the western popular music tradition including rock, pop, funk, etc) you’ll come out understanding how that music works better than most people. If you’re doing a music degree, there will be books recommended by your music programme, but honestly, Levine will cover most of what you need if you’re not doing a straight classical course in which case you’ll want to augment with a more conventional source so you understand the “rules” they want you to follow when writing pastiche counterpoint etc.

If you want to get big into composition and/or want to understand late romantic and 20th century music, get Harmonielehre and “Structural Functions of Harmony” by Schoenberg. Together they are by far the best harmony books I have ever seen and go super-deep into why the western classical tradition works the way it does. If you compose there’s a decent chance they will change your life forever as his approach is to not take anything for granted but exhibit everything with examples from masterworks of the western tradition. Amazing books both of them. Harmony is not a spectator sport though - to get full benefit you have to get the books and work through stuff on the piano. It will reward you immensely.

If you want something else that will blow your mind, read “The technique of my musical language” by Messiaen. If you read Levine first this will have the additional benefit of showing you where the “diminished” and “augmented” scales and the whole “harmonic major” thing come from.

[1] https://www.shermusic.com/products/the-jazz-theory-book

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ramesh31Sep 2026

Structural Functions of Harmony by Arnold Schoenberg. I can't even begin to understand it, it's just beautiful to encounter such genius and rigorous thought.

https://archive.org/details/structuralfuncti0000arno/page/n8...

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seanhunterApr 2024

For people who are not aware, "functional harmony" means the extended system of tonal harmony that you hear in basically almost all music apart from a very few exceptions (eg free atonality, serialism etc but there aren't many compared to the very large amount of functional harmony out there).

It's "functional" because the chords in the harmony have the function of establishing key centres, moving towards and away from them, establishing transitions to remote key areas etc.

One of the best technical books about functional harmony is "Structural Functions of Harmony" by Arnold Schoenberg[1], which is much shorter than his "Harmonielehre" but really packed with interesting detail about key and chord relationships.

[1] Yes that Schoenberg but this isn't about serialism, it's about trying to explain all the harmony up to and including Mahler. Here is an online pdf of an early edition https://is.muni.cz/el/1421/podzim2007/VH_53/Schoenberg_Struc...

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seanhunterDec 2023

From my read of "Theory of Harmony" and "Structural Functions of Harmony", it seems to me Schoenberg definitely wasn't aiming to be a great innovator, he was desperate to be part of the great tradition and saw serialism as an inevitable consequence of the way in which tonality was being stretched further and further in particular by Wagner and Schoenberg's great hero, Mahler. Schoenberg came up with the idea of serialism because he felt there needed to be some sort of formal constraint to give structure to the music in the absence of harmony because he felt the sense of a tonic was being stretched to breaking point anyway and would inevitably fail. People came up with other ways to provide this structure once the whole serialist -> integral serialist process had worked its way through.

Saying there's nothing you can't do in serialism you can't do in free atonality seems unfair. Firstly free atonality came about after integral serialism. Secondly, there's nothing you can do in any type of musical composition that you can't do in free atonality, so you may as well say all the things you can do with functional harmony are a worthless constraint.

As for popularity - I personally don't think that's an important characteristic at all, but if you do, there are lots of serialist works that are very popular (eg Wozzeck[1]).

[1] And I deliberately chose that one rather than say Berg's violin concerto which is also very popular because that's one of the ones that you're accusing of mining serialism for tonal elements

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