Arnold Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg was born September 13,1874 in Vienna. He used the spelling Schonberg until he moved to the United States in 1934. He began violin lessons when he was eight and almost immediately started composing. He had no formal training until he was in his late teens, when Zemlinsky became his teacher and friend. Arnold later befriended and married Zemlinsky’s sister in 1910. This Austrian and later American composer fell into the expressionist movement in German poetry and art. He was known for being a leader of the Second Viennese School and also for extending the traditionally opposed German Romantic traditions of both Brahms and Wagner. During the rise of the Nazi party in Austria, his music was labeled as degenerate art, along with jazz and swing. He developed the famous twelve-tone technique, a widely influential compositional method of manipulating an ordered series of all 12 notes in the chromatic scale. He was the first modern composer to embrace ways of developing motives without resorting to the dominant central melodic idea. Schoenberg was a painter, an important music theorist, and an influential composition teacher. Alban Berg, Anton Webern, and later John Cage were all students under the musical genius.

In Berlin he wrote the symphonic poem Pelleas und Melisande, pressing the Straussian model towards denser thematic argument and contrapuntal richness. He returned to Vienna and his musical style underwent a rapid forward movement. When atonality arrived, therefore, as it did in 1908, it came as the inevitable outcome of a doomed attempt to accommodate ever more disruptive material. However, Schoenberg found it possible a quarter-century later to return to something like his tonal style. He demonstrated this in such works as the Suite in G for strings, the completion of the Chamber Symphony no.2 and the Theme and Variations for band.

Gradually Schoenberg came to find the means for writing longer instrumental structures, in the 12-note serial method, and in the 1920s he returned to standard forms and genres, notably in the Suite for piano, String Quartet no.3, Orchestral Variations and several choral pieces. He also founded the Society for Private Musical Performances (1919-21), involving his pupils in the presentation of new music under favorable conditions. In 1923 his wife died (he remarried the next year), and in 1925 he moved to Berlin to take a master class at the Prussian Academy of Arts. While there