Charles Wuorinen - Simple Composition

Simple Composition (1979) is Charles Wuorinen's landmark treatise on twelve-tone composition, presenting a rigorous and highly systematic approach to serial technique that extends and reinterprets the methods of the Second Viennese School. Despite its ironic title, the work is a dense and demanding guide to Wuorinen's own compositional language — one grounded in the time-point system he developed with Harvey Sollberger, in which rhythmic structure is derived from the same series governing pitch.

Wuorinen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and one of the foremost figures of the American post-war avant-garde, offers in this volume not merely a theoretical framework but a compositional philosophy: that the twelve-tone system, far from exhausted, remains the most fertile ground for rigorous musical thought. Simple Composition stands alongside Schoenberg's Style and Idea and Babbitt's collected writings as essential reading in 20th-century compositional theory.

An essential resource for:

• Composers working in or studying twelve-tone and serial techniques
• Graduate students in music theory and composition
• Performers seeking analytical insight into the post-war American repertoire
• Libraries and conservatories with holdings in contemporary music theory

This copy is signed by the author and includes programme materials related to the premiere of his seventh symphony.