- Person
- Arnold Schoenberg
- Lived
- 1874–1951
- Field
- Composition
- From
- Austrian-American
The story
For centuries Western music had been organised around keys: a home note and chord that a piece leaves and returns to. Around 1908 Arnold Schoenberg, a largely self-taught composer born in Vienna's Leopoldstadt, the city's historic Jewish quarter, began writing music that floated free of any key, in works such as his Second String Quartet and the Book of the Hanging Gardens. The problem was what could hold such music together across large forms.
He searched for an answer for more than a decade. In July 1921 he told Alma Mahler that he was working on something completely new, and in 1923 he announced the result: a method of composing with twelve tones related only to one another. The composer arranges all twelve notes of the chromatic scale into a fixed order, called a row, and builds the whole work from that row and its mirror forms, played backwards, upside down or transposed. No single note dominates, yet every bar grows from the same source. Schoenberg said he aimed to continue a properly understood tradition rather than to shock.
His pupils Alban Berg and Anton Webern adopted the method, and for about twenty years it was used almost entirely by Schoenberg's circle. Works such as the Variations for Orchestra (1928), the Piano Concerto (1942) and the opera Moses und Aron, built entirely from a single row, showed how flexibly he could use it. The Austrian composer Josef Matthias Hauer devised a related system independently, but Schoenberg's version became the one that shaped music history.
By the 1950s the technique was used by composers such as Milton Babbitt, Luciano Berio, Pierre Boulez, Luigi Dallapiccola and Ernst Krenek, and after Schoenberg's death even Igor Stravinsky and Aaron Copland, who had long resisted it, took it up. Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen extended the principle into serialism, ordering rhythm, dynamics and articulation as well as pitch.
For decades the method was taught in university music departments across the world, and it remains a central chapter of every history of twentieth-century music.
Why it matters
Schoenberg gave composers a rigorous new language, one of the most influential ideas in twentieth-century 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
- Schoenberg's harmony textbook is still studiedArnold Schoenberg wrote his Harmonielehre (Theory of Harmony) in 1910, a teaching book that musicians still study more than a century later.
- 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
- Twelve-tone technique Wikipedia
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