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Arnold Schoenberg: Atonality Pioneer

Arnold Schoenberg was an influential Austrian composer in the 20th century known for developing twelve-tone technique. He was associated with the expressionist movement and led the Second Viennese School. As a Jewish composer, his works were banned by the Nazis. He developed a new approach to harmony and musical development that shaped much modern thought. Schoenberg taught many prominent composers and developed new compositional methods that influenced avant-garde music in the 20th century.

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99 views1 page

Arnold Schoenberg: Atonality Pioneer

Arnold Schoenberg was an influential Austrian composer in the 20th century known for developing twelve-tone technique. He was associated with the expressionist movement and led the Second Viennese School. As a Jewish composer, his works were banned by the Nazis. He developed a new approach to harmony and musical development that shaped much modern thought. Schoenberg taught many prominent composers and developed new compositional methods that influenced avant-garde music in the 20th century.

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Reo28
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Arnold Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg (/ˈʃɜːrnbɜːrɡ/, US also /ˈʃoʊn-/; German: [ˈʃøːnbɛɐ̯k]


( listen); 13 September 1874  – 13 July 1951) was an Austrian-born composer, music theorist,
teacher, writer, and painter. He is widely considered one of the most influential composers of the
20th century. He was associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and
leader of the Second Viennese School. As a Jewish composer, Schoenberg was targeted by the
Nazi Party, which labeled his works as degenerate music and forbade them from being
published.[1][2] He emigrated to the United States in 1933, becoming an American citizen in 1941.

Schoenberg's approach, bοth in terms of harmony and development, has shaped much of 20th-
century musical thought. Many European and American composers from at least three
generations have consciously extended his thinking, whereas others have passionately reacted
against it.

Schoenberg was known early in his career for simultaneously extending the traditionally opposed
German Romantic styles of Brahms and Wagner. Later, his name would come to personify
innovations in atonality (although Schoenberg himself detested that term) that would become
Schoenberg in Los Angeles, c. 1948
the most polemical feature of 20th-century classical music. In the 1920s, Schoenberg developed
the twelve-tone technique, an influential compositional method of manipulating an ordered
series of all twelve notes in the chromatic scale. He also coined the term developing variation and
was the first modern composer to embrace ways of developing motifs without resorting to the dominance of a centralized melodic
idea.

Schoenberg was also an influential teacher of composition; his students included Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Hanns Eisler, Egon
Wellesz, Nikos Skalkottas, Stefania Turkewich, and later John Cage, Lou Harrison, Earl Kim, Robert Gerhard, Leon Kirchner, Dika
Newlin, Oscar Levant, and other prominent musicians. Many of Schoenberg's practices, including the formalization of compositional
method and his habit of openly inviting audiences to think analytically, are echoed in avant-garde musical thought throughout the
20th century. His often polemical views of music history and aesthetics were crucial to many significant 20th-century musicologists
and critics, including Theodor W. Adorno, Charles Rosen, and Carl Dahlhaus, as well as the pianists Artur Schnabel, Rudolf Serkin,
Eduard Steuermann, and Glenn Gould.

Schoenberg's archival legacy is collected at the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna.

Contents
Biography
Early life
1901–1914: experimenting in atonality
World War I
Development of the twelve-tone method
Third Reich and move to the United States
Superstition and death
Music
First period: Late Romanticism
Second period: Free atonality
Third period: Twelve-tone and tonal works
Reception and legacy
First works
Twelve-tone period
Criticism
Relationship with the general public
Thomas Mann's novel Doctor Faustus
Personality and extramusical interests
Textbooks

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