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Schoenberg's music is admittedly hard to get into. But it is well worth spending some time with it because there is nothing quite like it. For a bit of contex
by antognini 7y ago
Schoenberg's music is admittedly hard to get into. But it is well worth spending some time with it because there is nothing quite like it.
For a bit of context, Schoenberg's atonal style was the culmination of centuries of development of Western harmony. From the Baroque/Classical era onward, the direction of Western music was towards greater chromaticism extending harmonies further and further away from the simple major and minor chords. Some composers came very close to complete atonality, particularly Scriabin and Stravinsky, but Schoenberg was the first to dive into completely atonal music.
While it may sound like someone randomly plonking on the keyboard, he had to work quite hard to get the atonal sound he wanted since harmonies are so ingrained in the way we hear music (especially for composers!). He developed the "twelve-tone system" in which each note had to be played exactly once in a theme so as to guarantee that no tonality was accidentally introduced by stressing particular notes.
The result is a style that is very cerebral, but enjoyable once you let go of the idea that music should contain traditional harmonies. Personally, I think the music world got a little obsessed about the idea and continued to develop it for maybe four decades longer than it should have. (His twelve tone technique was later extended to "serialism" which generalized the process to rhythms, dynamics, and instruments, and wasn't really abandoned by "serious" composers until maybe the 1980s.)
Incidentally, Schoenberg may have scared himself to death. He was intensely superstitious, particularly of the number 13. When he was 76 he was contacted by an astrologer who told him that this was a dangerous year since the digits of his age added up to 13. Later in the year, on Friday, July 13th, he spent the day extraordinarily anxious and died shortly before midnight.
- spacechild1 7y ago> Some composers came very close to complete atonality, particularly Scriabin and Stravinsky, but Schoenberg was the first to dive into completely atonal music. Atonality can already be found in some late piano pieces of Liszt, e.g. "Nuages gris", which is largely based on augmented triads (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYKl41e_hoU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYKl41e_hoU). Before that, the music of Wagner already shook the foundations of Western tonality with its excessive chromatisism where any notion of a tonal center is often lost. Schönberg just continued where others have left and went to the extreme. It is also worth pointing out that he first composed in the so called "free atonal" style and only then, after a long hiatus, he developed his twelve-tone-system. By the way, there have been other people who developed similar systems around the same time, notably Josef Matthias Hauer. Fun fact: Stranvinsky turned towards twelve-tone-technique in the fifties.
- qmmmur 7y agoYou can find a tone row in Bach even. Whether or not he consciously aimed to construct one is a debate that has no end, but it's interesting to challenge the conception that old = more traditional/harmonic, when in fact music history is much more wobbly than that.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y agoThe original chromatic series is in Lasso in the very late 16th century - Carmina Chromatico from Prophetiae Sybillarum. It's decorated with smooth triads and moments that sound like cadences, but the progression as a whole is completely atonal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=al41WvDW-OA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=al41WvDW-OA
- mazelife 7y agoI’ve found Charles Rosen’s book _Arnold Schoenberg_ to be an excellent introduction to the composer. It’s a short, well-written book. Not so much a biography, as an exploration of the music and the various phases of the Schoenberg’s musical language; from the early tonal works, through free atonality, and finally serialism. And the most valuable part for me was the way in which it contextualized serialism in light of everything that had come before in western music, and some of what was to come after, and the way it presents it as a kind of an inevitability for Schoenberg. It’s not heavy on theory and people with only a cursory knowledge of music could get something out of it.
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- Velofellow 7y agoThanks for the insightful comment! I agree about the difficulty in grasping his musical concepts. It certainly took me time. For anyone interested - his tone poem “Verklarte Nacht” is a great work to understand the culmination of European musical ideas you spoke of. It has some of the chromaticism and an eye to Schoenberg’s future work while still having the immediate payoff of more traditional Western Music. It’s a striking and beautiful piece.