integral to the tone, and that the evolution of music was drawing 'into the stock of artistic resources more and more of the harmonic possibilities inherent in the tone'. 16 Brown argues throughout the book that Schoenberg was self-consciously 'cleansing' the tonal system of the Jewish influence through his act of redemption in 1908, and thus sending atonality and those vagrant chords off to 'rove or wander endlessly' (115). Yet rather than creating two self-sufficient musical spheres, as Brown's formulation of redemption suggests, I see Schoenberg's works and writings from this period and throughout his life as showing him constantly exploring and reconfiguring the relationship between tonality, in its many manifestations, and the emancipation of the dissonance, in all its many meanings and its wideranging implications for melody, harmony, form, rhythm, and especially timbre through his notion of Klangfarbenmelodie. For example, while he could write to Busoni in 1909 of his efforts to remove 'all shackles of tonality' , two years later in the Harmonielehre the formulation is quite different: 'Who would dare to differentiate right from wrong in the instinct, in the unconscious, to keep separate the knowledge inherited from predecessors and the intuitive power granted by the spirit?' 17 Similarly, where Brown reads Schoenberg's discussion of nonharmonic tones as embracing anti-Semitic stereotypes of 'noise music' , I see him opening up a much broader conception of harmony: 'I maintain that these are chords: not of the system, but of music' (111). It is precisely this constant rethinking and reformulation of what music and sound could be-and thus his rejection of the notion that there could be some sort of singular act of musical redemption for once and for all-that motivated Schoenberg throughout his life and has made his music and ideas of such continuing relevance for more than a century. Brown describes Schoenberg and Redemption as 'both a cultural history and a celebration of some extraordinary musical works and the fertile mind of a pivotal composer who, politically, around 1908 was very much a man of his time, and in the 1920s and 30s was one way ahead of his time' (7). Readers may not agree with all her interpretations, but the book does open up interesting new perspectives while showing that there are many important threads in Schoenberg's music and thought still to unravel.
