SMT-V: The Society for Music Theory Videocast Journal
SMT-V is the open-access, peer-reviewed video journal of the Society for Music Theory. Founded in 2014, SMT-V publishes video essays that showcase research in music theory in a dynamic, audiovisual format, presented so as to have the potential to engage both specialists within the field as well as interested viewers outside the music theory community. The journal features a supportive and collaborative production process, and publishes several videos each year. Read more about SMT-V here.
Latest Issue: 12.3 (May 2026)
“Schoenberg on Schoenberg: An Unpublished Analysis of his String Quartet No. 4, op. 37 (1936)”
Philip Stoecker (Hofstra University)
This video reexamines Arnold Schoenberg’s concept of the sentence in Fundamentals of Musical Composition through draft materials that preserve self-analyses omitted from the 1967 posthumous publication. Although Schoenberg defines the sentence as a normative eight-measure design modeled on the music of Beethoven, Haydn, and Mozart, the drafts reveal his engagement with uneven and irregular phrase structures. Analyses of his Verklärte Nacht, the String Quartet No. 1, op. 10, Gurre-Lieder, and an unpublished analytical sketch for his String Quartet No. 4, op. 37 demonstrate how Schoenberg composed irregular, uneven phrases, including a 5½-measure sentence in the opening theme of his Fourth String Quartet. Reconstructing this passage as normalized six- and four-measure versions shows how his twelve-tone writing remained conceptually aligned with Classical models, especially that of Mozart.
Keywords: Arnold Schoenberg; Fundamentals of Musical Composition; String Quartet No. 4, op. 37; sentence phrase; musical form; uneven phrase lengths