Arnold Schoenberg (jan 1, 1874 – apr 1, 1951)

Description:

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.

Schoenberg
A. Schoenberg
1. More than any other composer, Schoenberg forced his music and ideas into music history.
2. Largely self-taught, he became a major teacher and theorist, as well as composer.
3. His music exploded many traditionally held ideas, yet he was acutely aware of how his contributions fit into the continuum of European music.
4. With his most illustrious pupils, Webern and Berg, he represents the “Second Viennese School.” (The term is misleading in both its emphasis on school—and therefore students, and its implication that this was all that happened in Vienna.)
5. Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht marks the end of the nineteenth century stylistically, as
well as temporally (1899).
B. A New Synthesis
1. Schoenberg merged previously disparate musical ideals, namely “roving harmony” (Wagner) and “developing variation” (Brahms).
2. From Brahms he particularly inherited the notion that motive governed everything.
3. Schoenberg wrote a few large early works, notably the Gurrelieder (1910–11). Enormous in the sense of Mahler’s Eighth, the work was very successful when premiered in 1913.
C. Expression Becomes an “Ism”
1. By the premiere of Gurrelieder, Schoenberg had stopped writing in the large, lush
Romantic style. He indicated a new direction in a letter to the artist Kandinsky in 1911: “One
must express oneself!” He emphasized inborn, instinctive emotions over acquired ones.
2. He also said that “art belongs to the unconscious!”
3. These ideas bring to the forefront the question of intelligibility when expressing the
unconscious.

At the Opposite Extreme: Atonal Miniatures
1. Beside Erwartung, Gureelieder, and others, Schoenberg simultaneously composed aphoristic miniatures.
2. Looking at the piano pieces in Op. 19, we see Schoenberg’s attempt at organicism in the extreme—which seems at odds with the search for primitive instincts of Expressionism.
3. Even more than his teacher, Webern worked toward economy of means.
a. Many of his works are extremely short.
b. He once noted that, once he had used all twelve notes, what else was left to do?
c. Webern developed a practice, named Klangfarbenmelodie, whereby tone color
has value as well as pitch.
4. Schoenberg’s most famous work from this period was Pierrot lunaire (1912), consisting of twenty-one miniatures.
a. Schoenberg added to the irony of the poetry by using melodrama (based on recitation) for the singer. He called this Sprechstimme.
b. Mondestrucken demonstrates how he approached cohesion in this work.

Twelve-Tone Music
A. The Ivory Tower
1. At the same time as Stravinsky was making great strides with his new objective music,
Schoenberg was having major difficulties, composing only infrequently.
2. He eventually created the Society for Private Musical Performances, a somewhat curious group that met to hear new music.
a. Performances were not advertised, and critics were not allowed in.
b. Subscribers didn’t know what was on the program, so they couldn’t pick and choose which performances to attend.
c. The performers presented accurate renditions of the music.
d. The repertory varied tremendously, including major composers from all over Europe.
3. The ideals of this group are related to Hegel’s thoughts concerning art as something not for consumers—which leads to the legacy of the “Ivory Tower.”

In Search of Utopia: Schoenberg and Twelve-Tone Technique
1. During the 1920s, Stravinsky made comments that irked Schoenberg.
a. Stravinsky said that instead of the music of the future, he wrote the music of the present.
b. He also made a derogatory comment concerning serial composers.
2. Schoenberg thought that Stravinsky’s use of old techniques was not moving the art forward.
3. Ultimately, however, both composers rejected Romanticism (“sauce”) for objectivity.
4. The sources of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique have been debated for some time.

Giving Music New Rules
1. From 1921 on, Schoenberg composed in a style known as serialism, or twelve-tone technique (dodecaphony).
2. A tone row is an ordering of all twelve pitches. It provides both melodic and harmonic material.
3. The row occurs in four orderings: Prime, Inversion, Retrograde, and Retrograde Inversion.
4. The internal properties of a row are of crucial importance.
5. Ordered interval content is the primary aim. These define other properties.
6. Serialism was the result of Schoenberg’s desire to emancipate dissonance; it allowed more objectivity.
7. The Suite for Piano was the first major work that used twelve-tone technique throughout.
8. The logic of twelve-tone technique allowed composers to make content and form
equal.
9. The clear design of twelve-tone technique answered the call for objectivity in post-war
Europe.

Back Again to Bach
1. With the twelve-tone method, Schoenberg could both demonstrate a connection to the
past and claim to move music into the future.
2. Schoenberg used Bach’s name in rows.
3. Unlike Stravinsky, who saw a timelessness and universality in Bach’s music, Schoenberg saw Bach as a national, German figure.
4. He attributed to the Baroque master a German penchant for counterpoint.
5. He thought that his “discovery” would enable German music to dominate for the next 100 years, but Hitler’s rise to power and persecution of Jews meant that Schoenberg had to leave Europe, heading to the United States in 1933.

Key Terms:

Grundgestalt - the “basic shape” of a composition, used by Arnold Schoenberg to organize his compositions

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