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Composer Profiles Arnold Schoenberg Born: Vienna, Austria - 1874 Died: Los Angeles, California - 1951 Biography Of all the composers living in the transition to the twentieth century, none had the greatest impact in the changing course of music than Arnold Schoenberg. Largely self-trained, Schoenberg would redefine the nature of music through his experiments into atonality and serialism, creating a new school of musical thought that would influence countless musicians. Born on September 13th, 1874, Schoenberg’s primary influences were the paragons of German music: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and Wagner. Like Wagner, he believed that music served as a message from the divine, elevating mankind to a new level of spiritual awareness. While his early music reflects the influence of his heroes, Schoenberg quickly turned away from any semblance of traditional structure that had been written up to that point. His music became more unstable, intense, and dissonant. Eventually all tonality was eliminated with The Book of the Hanging Gardens, Op. 15 (1909). In 1912, he composed one of his most significant works, Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21. This composition, involving a soprano soloist and small chamber ensemble, redefined how emotion could be expressed by music, particularly in the soprano’s Sprechstimme (half-singing, half-speech) technique. During his lifetime, Schoenberg’s works were met with hostility, and though Schoenberg lamented his lack of commercial success, he argued that audiences were not “mature” enough to appreciate his music. During World War I, Schoenberg served between 1915 and 1917, not publishing another piece until 1923. During this period of self-imposed silence, Schoenberg perfected his new technique that he said would “insure the superiority of German music for the next hundred years”. This innovation would be known as serialism, or the twelve-tone method, in which each chromatic tone would be used in a sequence, called a “row”. The sequence could be altered in various ways, including inverting the pitches, playing them backwards (retrograde), and combining the last two methods to produce an inverted retrograde version. Each row could be transposed, as long as the sequence remained intact for the duration. They could be used in various ranges, instrumental combinations, and rhythms to produce an original row every repetition. Soon afterwards, Schoenberg composed nothing but twelve-tone works. This was extremely influential on his students, particularly Alban Berg and Anton Webern, who would become master composers in their own right. Together, the three formed what is now called the Second Viennese School, following the so-called First Viennese School consisting of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and Schubert. In 1933, when the Nazi Party came to power, Schoenberg quickly fled to America and eventually settled in Los Angeles, where he began teaching at the University of California until his death in 1951 on his seventy-sixth birthday. Works Schoenberg’s earliest known works illustrate a gravitation toward complicated thematic progressions, flowing in unbroken phrases directly opposite to the ideals of the late-Romantic movement. Though retaining influences of Wagner, particularly in Transfigured Night, Op. 4, Schoenberg quickly reached the outskirts of chromatic harmony. In the period between 1907 to 1909, Schoenberg departed from tonality altogether, producing works such as The Book of the Hanging Gardens, Op. 15 and the Five Orchestral Pieces, Op. 16. In these works, there is no resolution to any tonic note, nor is there any sense of tonal center entirely. Schoenberg called this the “emancipation of dissonance”, where tones are “set free”, not relying on any kind of triadic structure. This kind of music was labeled by critics as “atonal”, which is still in use to the present day. Schoenberg’s melodies become more or less smaller, more compact, versions of themselves, sometimes as few as three or four notes. These “cells” as they are called, are altered to produce new pitch combinations that are related, yet can create individual phrases. This period of Schoenberg’s work leading up to World War I is referred to as his Expressionist period. Expressionism, the complete opposite of Romanticism, is the quality of dealing with the inner nature of the human psyche. It is straightforward, intense, and distorted, resulting in a raw, bare structure that reflects the complicated nature of the subconscious. Schoenberg’s most famous work, Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21, illustrates a disturbing insight into the nature of the mind in its twenty-one songs. In 1911, Schoenberg published his Harmonielehre (Theory of Harmony), which has become one of the twentieth-century’s central texts on musical composition. During World War I, Schoenberg wrote little, believing his previous work had not achieved the grand design that he felt he was meant to create. The resulting twelve-tone method that he pioneered divided composers into those who followed Schoenberg, such as Webern and Berg, and another camp that favored the preservation of tonality, like Stravinsky and Prokofiev. After this period of experimentation came a mass output of creativity, all relying on the twelvetone row. A three act opera, Moses und Aron, was started between 1930 and 1932, but remained unfinished at the composer’s death. In 1933, Schoenberg’s music was denounced by the Nazi Party, in part because of Schoenberg’s Jewish heritage. The composer was vacationing in France at the time, and did not return to Germany but immigrated to America, where he changed his family name from Schönberg to Schoenberg upon becoming an American citizen in 1941. During his final years in America he developed a renewed interest in tonality, evident in the Theme and Variations for Band, Op. 43. Though this may seem a contradiction to Schoenberg’s compositional ideology, Schoenberg referred to himself as a “conservative revolutionary”, extending the current tradition of music but not intending to replace it. In his music the world saw a completely new form of musical composition, and Schoenberg’s seminal importance in the development of twentiethcentury music cannot be overstated. Suggested Listening Transfigured Night, Op. 4 (1899); The Book of the Hanging Gardens, Op. 15 (1909); Five Orchestral Pieces, Op. 16 (1909); Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21 (1912); Four Orchestral Songs, Op. 22 (1916); Violin Concerto, Op. 26 (1936); Theme and Variations for Band, Op. 43 (1943); A Survivor from Warsaw, Op. 46 (1947); Moses und Aron (unfinished, 1932)