Arnold Schoenberg essays

Arnold Schoenberg essays The most important Expressionist composer was Arnold Schoenberg. He was born in 1874 in Vienna to a poor Orthodox Jewish family. He took violin lessons when he was younger but had no other musical training. He began composing at about the age of eight. He gradually came to feel that tonality-the centuries-old harmonic basis of music, with its carefully ordered hierarchy of keys and its feeling of a single, central key for each movement or work-had outlived its usefulness. He began to develop a completely new system of musical organization. At first he called this system atonality-meaning that the music uses so many chromatic notes that no tonal center can be heard. Schoenberg wrote many atonal pieces, the most important being, Das Buch der bangenden Garten (The Book of the Hanging Gardens), Five Pieces for Orchestra, and Pierrot Lunaire (Moonstruck Pierrot.) Schoenbergs music was not very popular and for several years he wrote no music at all. Atonality freed music from the straitjacket of tonality, but it had no organizing principle. In order to structure a piece with no keys Schoenberg had either made the pieces very short or held them together by text. A solution to the problem came with his new idea of the twelve-tone system. The twelve-tone system is an outgrowth of atonality, but has a strict unifying principle. The composer uses all the available notes, instead of just some of them (there are twelve notes in an octave, counting all the half steps.) But the notes are used in a strict order (established in advance by the composer), and this order must be followed throughout the piece. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 Schoenberg was summarily dismissed from his teaching job at the Academy of Arts in Berlin along with hundreds of thousands of Jews around Germany who lost their jobs. As a result, Schoenberg embraced Judaism more firmly than ever and many of his works including the orato...