J 0 S E F P.

U F ER, who is at present lecturer at the Freie

Universitt, Berlin, on contemporary music and general musical
theory, is a well-known international authority on modern music.
He was Schoenberg's pupil and his assistant at the Prussian
Academy of Arts in the 1920S; after Schoenberg's enforced
departure for America in 1933 they nevertheless managed to
remain in contact, in spite of the political difficulties of the time,
right up to Schoenberg's death in 1951. Schoenberg had actually
begun an active coUaboration in this book, which may be regarded
as the authoritative exposition of the Method of Composition
with Twelve Notes, based on examples drawn from Schoenberg's
own compositions as weIl as on his theoretical writings.
Rufer's book first appeared in Germany in 1952; twelve-note
music, banned since 1933 in Germany and German-occupied
countries, was now beginning to be written again there, hut it had
not gained a firm foothold either there or in the countries such as
England, Sweden, Switzerland and the Americas whele there had
been no !imitations on styles of composition. At first twelve-note
composers based their style on Schoenberg's works: but, as
Professor Walter Koineder has said in his book on Webern, "the
younger musicians soon showed a eertain aversion, especially 10
Sehoenberg's habits of expression. They quickly saw in the
'grand old man' of modern muste a late Romantie burdenecl with
the style of art nouveau and expressionism .... This aversion led
10 a critical attitude even to his teehnical methods of compo-sition."
However Kolneder was writing here of the avant-garde
composers, especially those who frequented the annual Darmstadt
Summer School, and in fact Schoenberg's reputation both
as a composer and a theorist has grown steadily since his death.
It is true that many of the younger generation have followed
methods which derived in the first place from Webern rather than