ABSTRACT
Arnold Schoenberg's Six Little Piano Pieces have undergone an enormous amount of analysis. This prodigious level of scrutiny is a testament to the electric, captivating quality of this "haunting, seemingly indestructible set of gems". During his New Music period, Schoenberg struggles with the practical impossibility of achieving absolute integrity. In the Six Little Piano Pieces, he circumvents this impossibility by means of a kind of infinite interruption that zeroes in on a singularity at the end where the tone and its imitation are absolutely identical. Schoenberg's implicit exploitation of two possibilities that he mentions in Harmonielehre: "the idea could be spun out still further or new ones attached". The self-embedding of the music is analogous to the dual appearance of the Ursatz in a piece of music with interruption, with one important difference. For Schenker, interruption need not be infinite, but for Schoenberg, the self-embedding must be infinite for the music to catch up with the evolution of perception.
