- Person
- Arnold Schoenberg
- Lived
- 1874–1951
- Field
- Composition
- From
- Austrian-American
The story
Arnold Schoenberg is famous for breaking with traditional harmony, yet he was also a deeply traditional teacher. Largely self-taught, apart from counterpoint lessons with Alexander von Zemlinsky, he supported himself in Vienna for years by teaching private pupils, among them Alban Berg and Anton Webern. In the summer of 1910 he gathered that experience into a large treatise, the Harmonielehre, or Theory of Harmony.
The book teaches the classical rules of harmony thoroughly, but it presents them as practical lessons drawn from the music of the great composers rather than as eternal laws. It also looks ahead, discussing chords and progressions that traditional textbooks ignored; Schoenberg used its pages to describe the floating, suspended harmonies of his own recent music. Published by Universal Edition in 1911, it was dedicated to the memory of Gustav Mahler, who had championed and supported him and who died in May of that year.
A revised third edition appeared in 1922. An English translation by Roy E. Carter, based on that edition, was published by the University of California Press in 1978 as Theory of Harmony, and a 100th anniversary edition followed in 2010. The Mahler Foundation describes it as one of the most influential music-theory books ever written.
In the United States, where he taught at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles, Schoenberg wrote further teaching books for his students. Structural Functions of Harmony appeared in 1954 and Fundamentals of Musical Composition, edited by his former student Gerald Strang, in 1967, both after his death. His collected essays, Style and Idea, also remain widely read.
Together these books show how Schoenberg saw himself: not as the destroyer of the great tradition but as its heir. Scholars of the Second Viennese School have noted that his teaching, as his textbooks show, was highly traditional and conservative. Generations of students who have never played a note of his own music have learned harmony and form from him.
Why it matters
Schoenberg's textbooks have trained generations of musicians in harmony and form, far beyond those who play his own music.
About Arnold Schoenberg
Viennese composer who broke with traditional harmony, invented the twelve-tone method, and returned to Judaism in defiance of the Nazis, writing Moses und Aron and A Survivor from Warsaw.
More about Arnold Schoenberg
- Arnold Schoenberg created the twelve-tone methodIn 1923 Arnold Schoenberg announced his method of composing with twelve tones, a new way of organising music that shaped composition for half a century.
- Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire created a lasting ensembleSchoenberg's 1912 Pierrot lunaire, 21 poems for a half-sung reciter and five players, created the 'Pierrot ensemble' that composers still write for today.
- Schoenberg's society gave 353 performances of new musicIn 1918 Arnold Schoenberg founded Vienna's Society for Private Musical Performances, which gave 353 carefully rehearsed performances of new music for its members.
- In America Schoenberg taught John Cage and Lou HarrisonAfter fleeing Nazi Germany, Arnold Schoenberg taught in Los Angeles, becoming a UCLA professor in 1936; his students included John Cage and Lou Harrison.
- Schoenberg taught Alban Berg and Anton WebernArnold Schoenberg's Vienna pupils Alban Berg and Anton Webern became major composers in their own right, forming with him the Second Viennese School.
- Schoenberg's Transfigured Night became a beloved classicArnold Schoenberg's string sextet Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), written in 1899 when he was 25, remains one of the most performed works of its era.
- Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw honoured the murderedArnold Schoenberg's 1947 A Survivor from Warsaw, for narrator, men's chorus and orchestra, ends with prisoners singing the Shema as they face death.
- Schoenberg's Moses und Aron wrestled with an unseen GodArnold Schoenberg's opera Moses und Aron, composed 1930–32, dramatises the Jewish idea of a God who cannot be pictured, through the clash of two brothers.
Sources
- Arnold Schoenberg Wikipedia
- Arnold Schoenberg Mahler Foundation
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