jan 1, 1911 - Harmonielehre

Description:

Schoenberg's text on music theory.

“Emancipation of Dissonance”
1. Schoenberg’s mental state influenced his music, as the episode involving marital strife
(and the suicide of his wife’s lover) in 1906–07 reveals.
2. Schoenberg was a painter as well as a composer, and both idioms reveal his turbulent
emotional state at this time.
3. Schoenberg’s theory text, Harmonielehre (1911), proceeds rather predictably until the
final section, beginning with the chapter on “Consonance and Dissonance.”
4. He saw the logical step from here the “emancipation of dissonance.”
a. Composers did not have to resolve chords a certain way.
b. Harmony was not functional.
c. Schoenberg demonstrates “fluctuating” tonality with examples from Wagner. Motive, not tonality, holds the music together.

Atonality: “The Air of Another Planet”
1. Although his music was described as “atonal,” Schoenberg preferred “pantonal.”
2. In defining words like “tonality” and “dissonance,” we need to question various
procedures and see why Schoenberg was compelled to deal with them.
3. The move to pantonality took Schoenberg several years. He dabbled in various
traditional procedures (as established by composers such as Brahms and Mahler).

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