The historic encounter around 1911 between the composer Arnold Schonberg and the painter Wassily Kandinsky occurred at a moment when the first wild revolts against traditional art, Dada and Futurism, had just manifested themselves. Independently of those sometimes spectacular activities, both Schonberg and Kandinsky had already concluded that the material and the compositional methods they had relied on in the past were exhausted and did not satisfy the development of their artistic ideas.
Both artists had already submitted their modes of production to a critical analysis which resulted in Schonberg's Theory of Harmony and Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art, both of 1911 - indeed the two artists had already been putting their self-criticism into practice for some time. In Schonberg's case this led to breaking with tonality; Kandinsky effected the transition to abstract painting.
This book is a collection of the papers presented at the conference on Schonberg and Kandin

The historic encounter around 1911 between the composer Arnold Schonberg and the painter Wassily Kandinsky occurred at a moment when the first wild revolts against traditional art - Dada and Futurism - had just manifested themselves. This volume is a collection of the papers presented at the conference on Schonberg and Kandinsky at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague in January 1993. The conference focused on the varying aspects of the avant-garde from 1910 to 1913, when both Schonberg and Kandinsky formulated their far-reaching views on the ways in which music and painting should develop, and discussed their common interest in new theatrical forms of presentation.

Order and Disorder is the result of the first International Orpheus Academy for Music Theory, held in 2003. Its theme was 20th century music and theory, especially after the 1950s. Five guest lecturers discussed theoretical, historical and philosophical aspects of this theme in six articles. In "Music-Analytical Trends of the Twentieth Century," Jonathan Dunsby discusses key features in the development of music analysis from prestructuralist to postmodern times. Joseph N. Straus describes different ways in which intervallic and motivic ideas of the musical surface in atonal music are projected over larger spans. Yves Knockaert investigates the controllability of non-intention in Cage's work, the compositional approach of Morton Feldman's "floating thoughts" and the "raw state" of Wolfgang Rihm's music of the 1980s. In "Nature and the Sublime: the Politics of Order and Disorder in Twentieth-Century Music," Max Paddison exposes a history of the concept of nature in relation to music with some references to literature and the visual arts. Konrad Boehmer analyses several aspects of the political economy of music in "Music and Politics." In "Towards a Terza Prattica," he focuses on the perspectives of the paradigmatic change which electric music has caused.