REPERTOIRE The Pierrot Ensembles: Chronicle and Catalogue, 1912-2012. By Christopher Dromey. Edited by Christopher Win tie. Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2012. [xii, 299 p. ISBN 9780956600721 (hardcover), $70; ISBN 9780956600738 (paperback), $29.95.] Music examples, illus- trations, works lists, bibliography, index.Among the many fertile elements of Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire for the future of music is its medium. The Pierrot ensemble consists of speaking voice and five instruments-flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano-of which the first three in- struments double, respectively, on piccolo, bass clarinet, and viola. Schoenberg uses his instrumental ensemble in Pierrot to pro- duce changing colors such that no two of the twenty-one melodramas have just the same sound. In a letter of 5 July 1912 to his publisher Emil Hertzka, Schoenberg stressed the importance of color and in- sisted that the work be published in full score: "Pierrot lunaire can only appear in score! A piano reduction is unthinkable! . . . Color is everything, the notes mean noth- ing" {Arnold Schonberg: Samtliche Werke, series B, vol. 24/1 [Mainz: Schott, 1995], 233).Schoenberg's proposition in 1912 that "color is everything" was the outcome of a broad shift in orchestration practices among progressive composers near the turn of the twentieth century. Gustav Mahler and Claude Debussy had begun to pare down the large nineteenth-century or- chestra in favor of smaller and more trans- parent instrumental groupings with lines treated soloistically. Schoenberg joined in this movement in 1901 with his song "Nachtwandler," in which the voice is ac- companied by piccolo, trumpet, piano, and drum, and he continued to explore the expressive resources of small soloistic en- sembles in his Chamber Symphony, op. 9 (1906), Three Pieces for Chamber Orchestra (1910), and in arrangements made following World War I for his Verein fur Musikalische Privatauffuhrungen.The combination of such mixed ensem- bles with a voice singing modernistic poetry arose in Schoenberg's mind around 1911, at first theoretically. In his essay "Das Verhaltnis zum Text"-written to appear in the almanac Der Blaue Reiter (ed. Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc [Munich: R. Piper, 1912])-Schoenberg speculated that advanced vocal music need not express the content of a poem by conventional mu- sical description, but could do so more fully by reaching to a deeper level to repro- duce the sound or "tone" contained in a poem. In a letter of 1931 to Julius Bahle, the composer asserts that when composing a song, his first encounter with its poem awakens in him "an unnamable sense of a sound and moving space" (cited in Willi Reich, Schoenberg: A Critical Biography [New York: Praeger, 1971], 238).Schoenberg put his theory to work first in the song Herzgewachse, op. 20 (1912), where the voice (itself treated like an in- strument) is combined with harp, celesta, and harmonium. Pierrot lunaire followed closely behind, and it proved to be Schoen- berg's most enduring and influential appli- cation of his theory of the congruence of color, sound, and poetry.The Pierrot ensemble was subsequently adopted and altered by composers from Schoenberg's own circle and others, in- cluding Stravinsky, who heard Pierrot in Berlin in 1912 and found that it "most in- tensively displayed the whole extraordinary stamp of [Schoenberg's] creative genius" (Stephen Walsh, Stravinsky: A Creative Spring: Russia and France, 1881-1934 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999], 190). Many, perhaps most, of these early Pierrot ensemble pieces were created to flesh out concert programs on which Pierrot was scheduled to appear. These include Anton Webern's 1922 arrangement for five instru- ments of Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony and Hanns Eisler's Palmstrom (1924), a recitation of Christian Morgenstern's po- etry that closely relates to the style and at- mosphere of Schoenberg's Pierrot.A history of such extensions and reap- pearances of the Pierrot ensemble in British music is the subject of Christopher Dromey's The Pierrot Ensembles: Chronicle and Catalogue, 1912-2012. …