ABSTRACT
Th e title of this chapter might remind some readers of an article by Andrew Mead that appeared in Perspectives of New Music more than two decades ago (Mead 1985), in which the author used sophisticated set-theoretic analytical techniques to dig beneath the surface of Arnold Schoenberg’s music, disclosing a “large-scale strategy” at work within several of the twelve-tone compositions. Mead had the advantage of writing for a scholarly community already well convinced of Schoenberg’s genius. I suspect the idea of placing the music of the British rock group Genesis in the same league as Schoenberg would be greeted with considerable skepticism-if not downright horror-by many musicologists, and this is certainly not my intent in the present essay. (Alas, it will probably require some drastic revolutions in taste before such earlyGenesis classics as “Th e Return of the Giant Hogweed” are admitted into the canon of twentieth-century masterworks.) But I do hope to show that despite being several musical worlds removed from Schoenberg, Genesis’ music is rich, diverse, and equally worthy of our analytical attention.
