In music, serialism is a method or technique of composition (Griffiths 2001, 116) that uses a series of values to manipulate different musical elements. Serialism began primarily with Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, though his contemporaries were also working to establish serialism as one example of post-tonal thinking (Whittall 2008, 1). Twelve-tone technique orders the 12 notes of the chromatic scale, forming a row or series and providing a unifying basis for a composition's melody, harmony, structural progressions, and variations. Other types of serialism also work with sets, collections of objects, but not necessarily with fixed-order series, and extend the technique to other musical dimensions (often called "parameters"), such as duration, dynamics, and timbre. The idea of serialism is also applied in various ways in the visual arts, design, and architecture (Bandur 2001, 5, 12, 74; Gerstner 1964, passim). The musical use of the word "series" should not be confused with the mathematical term "series."

Integral serialism or total serialism is the use of series for aspects such as duration, dynamics, and register as well as pitch (Whittall 2008, 273). Other terms, used especially in Europe to distinguish post–World War II serial music from twelve-tone music and its American extensions, are general serialism and multiple serialism (Grant 2001, 5–6).

Composers such as Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Alban Berg, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono, Milton Babbitt and Jean Barraqué used serial techniques of one sort or another in most of their music. Other composers such as Béla Bartók, Luciano Berio, Benjamin Britten, Aaron Copland, Olivier Messiaen, Arvo Pärt, Walter Piston, Ned Rorem, Alfred Schnittke, Dmitri Shostakovich, Igor Stravinsky, and even some jazz composers such as Yusef Lateef and Bill Evans used serialism only for some of their compositions or only for some sections of pieces.

Basic definitions[link]

Serialism is a method (Griffiths 2001, 116), "highly specialized technique" (Wörner 1973, 196), or "way" (Whittall 2008, 1) of composition. It may also be considered, "a philosophy of life (Weltanschauung), a way of relating the human mind to the world and creating a completeness when dealing with a subject" (Bandur 2001, 5).

However, serialism is not by itself a system of composition, nor is it a style. Neither is pitch serialism necessarily incompatible with tonality, though it is most often used as a means of composing atonal music (Griffiths 2001, 116).

"Serial music" is a problematic term because it is used differently in different languages and especially because, shortly after its coinage in French, it underwent essential alterations during its transmission to German (Frisius 1998, 1327). The use of the word "serial" in connection with music was first introduced in French by René Leibowitz (1947), and immediately afterward by Humphrey Searle in English, as an alternative translation of the German Zwölftontechnik Twelve-tone technique or Reihenmusik (row music); it was independently introduced by Herbert Eimert and Karlheinz Stockhausen into German in 1954 as serielle Musik, with a different meaning, translated into English also as "serial music".

Twelve-tone serialism[link]

Serialism of the first type is most specifically defined as the structural principle according to which a recurring series of ordered elements (normally a set—or row—of pitches or pitch classes), which are used in order or manipulated in particular ways to give a piece unity. Serialism is often broadly applied to all music written in what Arnold Schoenberg called "The Method of Composing with Twelve Notes related only to one another" (Schoenberg 1975, 218; Anon. [n.d.]), or dodecaphony, and methods that evolved from his methods. It is sometimes used more specifically to apply only to music where at least one other element other than pitch is subjected to being treated as a row or series. In such usages post-Webernian serialism will be used to denote works that extend serial techniques to other elements of music. Other terms used to make the distinction are 12-note serialism for the former, and integral serialism for the latter.

A row may be assembled pre-compositionally (perhaps to embody particular intervallic or symmetrical properties), or it may be derived from a spontaneously invented thematic or motivic idea. The structure of the row, however, does not in itself define the structure of a composition, which requires development of a comprehensive strategy. The choice of available strategies will of course depend on the relationships contained in a row class, and rows may be constructed with an eye to producing the relationships needed to form desired strategies (Mead 1985, 129–30).

The basic set may have additional restrictions, such as the requirement that it use each interval only once.

Non-twelve-tone serialism[link]

Rules of analysis derived from twelve-tone theory do not apply to serialism of the second type: "in particular the ideas, one, that the series is an intervallic sequence, and two, that the rules are consistent" (Maconie 2005, 119). Stockhausen, for example, in early serial compositions such as Kreuzspiel and Formel, "advances in unit sections within which a preordained set of pitches is repeatedly reconfigured. . . . The composer’s model for the distributive serial process corresponds to a development of the Zwölftonspiel of Josef Matthias Hauer" (Maconie 2005, 56), and Goeyvaerts, in such a work as Nummer 4,

provides a classic illustration of the distributive function of seriality: 4 times an equal number of elements of equal duration within an equal global time is distributed in the most equable way, unequally with regard to one another, over the temporal space: from the greatest possible coïncidence to the greatest possible dispersion. This provides an exemplary demonstration of that logical principle of seriality: every situation must occur once and only once. (Sabbe 1977, 114)

For Henri Pousseur, after an initial period working with twelve-tone technique in works like Sept Versets (1950) and Trois Chants sacrés (1951), serialism

evolved away from this bond in Symphonies pour quinze Solistes [1954–55] and in the Quintette [à la mémoire d’Anton Webern, 1955], and from around the time of Impromptu [1955] encounters whole new dimensions of application and new functions.

The twelve-tone series loses its imperative function as a prohibiting, regulating, and patterning authority; its working-out is abandoned through its own constant-frequent presence: all 66 intervallic relations among the 12 pitches being virtually present. Prohibited intervals, like the octave, and prohibited successional relations, such as premature note repetitions, frequently occur, although obscured in the dense contexture. The number twelve no longer plays any governing, defining rôle; the pitch constellations no longer hold to the limitation determined by their formation. The dodecaphonic series loses its significance as a concrete model of shape (or a well-defined collection of concrete shapes) is played out. And the chromatic total remains active only, and provisionally, as a general reference. (Sabbe 1977, 264)

History of serial music[link]

Serialism first appeared in the 1920s, with antecedents predating that year. Schoenberg was the composer most decisively involved in devising and demonstrating the fundamentals of twelve-tone serialism, though it is clear it is not the work of just one musician (Whittall 2008, 1).

The serialization of rhythm, dynamics, and other elements of music was partly fostered by the work of Olivier Messiaen and his analysis students, including Karel Goeyvaerts and Boulez, in post-war Paris.

Twelve-tone music[link]

In the early 20th century composers began to struggle against the ordered system of chords and intervals known as "functional tonality", in an effort to find new forms of expression and underlying structural organizing principles (Delahoyd [n.d.]).

Serialism and high modernism[link]

Serialism, along with John Cage's indeterminate music (music composed with the use of chance operations), and Werner Meyer-Eppler's aleatoricism, was enormously influential in post-war music. Theorists such as George Perle codified serial systems, and his 1962 text Serial Composition and Atonality became a standard work on the origins of serial composition in the work of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern.

Several of the composers associated with Darmstadt, notably Karlheinz Stockhausen, Karel Goeyvaerts, and Henri Pousseur developed a form of serialism that initially rejected the recurring rows characteristic of twelve-tone technique, in order to eradicate any lingering traces of thematicism (Felder 1977, 92). Instead of a recurring, referential row, "each musical component is subjected to control by a series of numerical proportions" (Morgan 1975, 3). In Europe, the style of some serial as well as non-serial music of the early 1950s emphasized the determination of all parameters for each note independently, often resulting in widely spaced, isolated "points" of sound, an effect called first in German "punktuelle Musik" ("pointist" or "punctual music"), then in French "musique ponctuelle", but quickly confused with "pointillistic" (German "pointillistische", French "pointilliste") the familiar term associated with the densely packed dots in paintings of Seurat, despite the fact that the conception was at the opposite extreme (Stockhausen and Frisius 1998, 451).

Pieces were structured by closed sets of proportions, a method closely related to certain works from the de Stijl and Bauhaus movements in design and architecture called "serial art" by some writers (Bochner 1967, Gerstner 1964, Guderian 1985, Sykora 1983), specifically the paintings of Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, Bart van Leck, Georg van Tongerloo, Richard Paul Lohse, and Burgoyne Diller, who had been seeking to “avoid repetition and symmetry on all structural levels and working with a limited number of elements” (Bandur 2001, 54).

Stockhausen described the final synthesis in this manner:

So serial thinking is something that's come into our consciousness and will be there forever: it's relativity and nothing else. It just says: Use all the components of any given number of elements, don't leave out individual elements, use them all with equal importance and try to find an equidistant scale so that certain steps are no larger than others. It's a spiritual and democratic attitude toward the world. The stars are organized in a serial way. Whenever you look at a certain star sign you find a limited number of elements with different intervals. If we more thoroughly studied the distances and proportions of the stars we'd probably find certain relationships of multiples based on some logarithmic scale or whatever the scale may be. (Cott 1973, 101)

Igor Stravinsky's adoption of twelve-tone serial techniques offers an example of the level of influence that serialism had after the Second World War. Previously Stravinsky had used series of notes without rhythmic or harmonic implications (Shatzkin 1977). Because many of the basic techniques of serial composition have analogs in traditional counterpoint, uses of inversion, retrograde and retrograde inversion from before the war are not necessarily indicative of Stravinsky adopting Schoenbergian techniques. However with his meeting Robert Craft and acquaintance with younger composers, Stravinsky began to consciously study Schoenberg's music, as well as the music of Webern and later composers, and began to use the techniques in his own work, using, for example, serial techniques applied to fewer than 12 notes. Over the course of the 1950s he used procedures related to Messiaen, Webern and Berg. While it is difficult to label each and every work as "serial" in the strict definition, every major work of the period has clear uses and references to its ideas.

During this period, the concept of serialism influenced not only new compositions but also the scholarly analysis of the classical masters. Adding to their professional tools of sonata form and tonality, scholars began to analyze previous works in the light of serial techniques; for example they found the use of row technique in previous composers going back to Mozart and Beethoven (Jalowetz 1944, 387; Keller 1955, passim). In particular, the orchestral outburst that introduces the development section half-way through the last movement of Mozart's next-to-last symphony is a tone row that Mozart punctuates in a very modern and violent episode that Michael Steinberg called "rude octaves and frozen silences" (Steinberg 1998, 400).

Furthermore, the organizing principles of serialism inspired mathematical analogues, such as uses of set theory, group theory, operators^{[clarification needed]}, and parametrization, for example in the post-war works of Elliott Carter, Iannis Xenakis, and Witold Lutosławski. Likewise, the mathematical analogues in integral serialism were influential in the development of electronic music and synthesized music. Ruth Crawford Seeger is credited with extending serial controls to parameters other than pitch and to formal planning as early as 1930–33 (Tick 2001).

Reactions to and against serialism[link]

Some music theorists have criticized serialism on the basis that the compositional strategies employed are often incompatible with the way information is extracted by the human mind from a piece of music. Nicolas Ruwet (1959) was one of the first to criticise serialism through a comparison with linguistic structures. Henri Pousseur (1959) questioned the equivalence made by Ruwet between phoneme and the single note, and suggested that analyses of serial compositions that Ruwet names as exceptions to his criticisms might "register the realities of perception more accurately." Later writers have continued Ruwet's line of reasoning. Fred Lerdahl, for example, outlines this subject further in his essay "Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems" (Lerdahl 1988). Lehrdahl has in turn been criticized for excluding "the possibility of other, non-hierarchical methods of achieving musical coherence," and for concentrating on the audibility of tone rows (Grant 2001, 219), and the portion of his essay focussing on Boulez's "multiplication" technique (exemplified in three movements of Le Marteau sans maître) has been challenged on perceptual grounds by Stephen Heinemann (1998) and Ulrich Mosch (2004).

Within the community of modern music, exactly what constituted serialism was also a matter of debate. The conventional English usage is that the word "serial" applies to all 12-tone music, which is a subset of serial music, and it is this usage that is generally intended in reference works. Nevertheless, a large body of music exists that is called "serial" but does not employ note-rows at all, let alone twelve-tone technique (e.g., Stockhausen's Stimmung, Pousseur's Scambi).

Theory of twelve-tone serial music[link]

The vocabulary of serialism eventually became rooted in set theory, and uses a seemingly quasi-mathematical vocabulary to describe how the basic sets are manipulated to produce the final result. Musical set theory is often used to analyze and compose serial music, but may also be used to study tonal music and nonserial atonal music.

The basis for serial composition is Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, where the 12 notes of the basic chromatic scale are organized into a row. This "basic" row is then used to create permutations, that is, rows derived from the basic set by reordering its elements. The row may be used to produce a set of intervals, or a composer may have wanted to use a particular succession of intervals, from which the original row was created. A row that uses all of the intervals in their ascending form once is an all-interval row. In addition to permutations, the basic row may have some set of notes derived from it, which is used to create a new row, these are derived sets.

Because there are tonal chord progressions that use all 12 notes, it is possible to create pitch rows with very strong tonal implications, and even to write tonal music using 12-tone technique. Most tone rows contain subsets that can imply a pitch center; a composer can create music centered on one or more of the row's constituent pitches by emphasizing or avoiding these subsets, respectively, as well as through other, more complex compositional devices (Newlin 1974; Perle 1977).

To serialize other elements of music, a system quantifying an identifiable element must be created or defined (this is called "parametrization", after the term in mathematics). For example, if duration is to be serialized, then a set of durations must be specified. If tone colour is to be serialized, then a set of separate tone colours must be identified, and so on.

The selected set or sets, their permutations and derived sets form the basic material with which the composer works.

Composition using 12-tone serial methods focuses on each appearance of the collection of twelve chromatic notes, called an aggregate. (Sets of more or fewer pitches, or of elements other than pitch may be treated analogously.) The principle is that in a row, no element of the aggregate should be reused until all of the other members have been used, and each member must appear only in its place in the series. This rule is violated in numerous works still termed "serial".

An aggregate may be divided into subsets, and all the members of the aggregate not part of any one subset are said to be its complement. A subset is self-complementing if it contains half of the set and its complement is also a permutation of the original subset. This is most commonly seen with hexachords or 6 notes of a basic tone row. A hexachord that is self-complementing for a particular permutation is referred to as prime combinatorial. A hexachord that is self-complementing for all of the canonic operations—Inversion, Retrograde and Retrograde Inversion—is referred to as all-combinatorial.

The composer then presents the aggregate. If there are multiple serial sets, or if several parameters are associated with the same set, then a presentation will have these values calculated. Large-scale design may be achieved through the use of combinatorial devices, for example, subjecting a subset of the basic set to a series of combinatorial devices.

Notable composers[link]

See also[link]

• Pitch interval

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Eco, Umberto. 2005. "Innovation & Repetition: Between Modern & Postmodern Aesthetics". Daedalus 134, no. 4, 50 Years (Fall): 191–207.
• Gollin, Edward. 2007. "Multi-Aggregate Cycles and Multi-Aggregate Serial Techniques in the Music of Béla Bartók." Music Theory Spectrum 29, no. 2 (Fall): 143–76.
• Gredinger, Paul. 1955. "Das Serielle". Die Reihe 1 ("Elektronische Musik"): 34–41. English as "Serial Technique", translated by Alexander Goehr. Die Reihe 1 ("Electronic Music"), (English edition 1958): 38–44.
• Rahn, John. 1980. Basic Atonal Theory. New York: Schirmer Books.
• Savage, Roger W. H. 1989. Structure and Sorcery: The Aesthetetics of Post-War Serial Composition and Indeterminancy. Outstanding Dissertations in Music from British Universities. New York: Garland Publications. ISBN 0-8240-2041-3.
• Schoffman, Nathan. 1981. "Serialism in the Works of Charles Ives". Tempo, new series, no. 138 (September): 21–32.
• Scruton, Roger. 1997. Aesthetics of Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 0-19-816638-9. Quoted in Arved Ashbey, The Pleasure of Modernist Music (University of Rochester Press, 2004) p. 122. ISBN 1-58046-143-3.
• White, Eric Walter, and Jeremy Noble. 1984. "Stravinsky". In The New Grove Modern Masters. London: Macmillan.

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Serialism

• Art of the States: serial/twelve-note serial and/or twelve-note works by American composers.
• The tone row in the last movement of Mozart's Symphony No. 40. Beginning at Bar 128 on page 54, the tone row might be^{[original research?]} the following: B, C, D, E♭, F♯, B♭, C♯, F, G♯, A, E, G—where the exposition of the last three notes of the tone row trails into the sounding of the A major dominant chord for the D minor development section that follows. The first page of Mozart's Symphony No. 40 can be found at this link.

Arnold Schoenberg, Los Angeles, 1948

 Arnold Schoenberg (help·info) (pronounced [ˈaːɐ̯nɔlt ˈʃøːnbɛɐ̯k]; 13 September 1874 – 13 July 1951) was an Austrian composer and painter, associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School. He used the spelling Schönberg until after his move to the United States in 1934 (Steinberg 1995, 463), whereupon he altered it to Schoenberg "in deference to American practice" (Foss 1951, 401), though one writer claims he made the change a year earlier (Ross 2007, 45).

Schoenberg's approach, both in terms of harmony and development, is among the major landmarks of 20th-century musical thought; at least three generations of composers in the European and American traditions have consciously extended his thinking or, in some cases, passionately reacted against it. During the rise of the Nazi Party in Austria, his music was labeled, alongside jazz, as degenerate art^{[citation needed]}.

Schoenberg was widely known early in his career for his success in simultaneously extending the traditionally opposed German Romantic styles of Brahms and Wagner. Later, his name would come to personify pioneering innovations in atonality (although Schoenberg himself detested the term "atonality" as inaccurate in describing his intentions) that would become the most polemical feature of 20th-century art music. In the 1920s, Schoenberg developed the twelve-tone technique, a widely influential compositional method of manipulating an ordered series of all twelve notes in the chromatic scale. He also coined the term developing variation, and was the first modern composer to embrace ways of developing motifs without resorting to the dominance of a centralized melodic idea.

Schoenberg was also a painter, an important music theorist, and an influential teacher of composition; his students included Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Hanns Eisler, Egon Wellesz, and later John Cage, Lou Harrison, Earl Kim, Leon Kirchner, and many other prominent musicians. Many of Schoenberg's practices, including the formalization of compositional method, and his habit of openly inviting audiences to think analytically, are echoed in avant-garde musical thought throughout the 20th century. His often polemical views of music history and aesthetics were crucial to many of the 20th century's significant musicologists and critics, including Theodor Adorno, Charles Rosen, and Carl Dahlhaus. His thought also had a considerable influence on the pianists Rudolf Serkin, Artur Schnabel, and Eduard Steuermann, and, later, Glenn Gould.

Schoenberg's archival legacy is collected at the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna.

Biography[link]

Arnold Schoenberg was born into a lower middle-class Jewish family in the Leopoldstadt district (in earlier times a Jewish ghetto) of Vienna, at "Obere Donaustraße 5". His father Samuel, a native of Bratislava, was a shopkeeper. Although his mother Pauline, a native of Prague, was a piano teacher, Arnold was largely self-taught. He took only counterpoint lessons with the composer Alexander von Zemlinsky, who was to become his first brother-in-law (Beaumont 2000, 87).

In his twenties, Schoenberg earned a living by orchestrating operettas, while composing his own works, such as the string sextet Verklärte Nacht ("Transfigured Night") (1899). He later made an orchestral version of this, which became one of his most popular pieces. Both Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler recognized Schoenberg's significance as a composer; Strauss when he encountered Schoenberg's Gurre-Lieder, and Mahler after hearing several of Schoenberg's early works.

Strauss turned to a more conservative idiom in his own work after 1909 and at that point dismissed Schoenberg. Mahler adopted him as a protégé and continued to support him even after Schoenberg's style reached a point which Mahler could no longer understand; Mahler worried about who would look after him after his death. Schoenberg, who had initially despised and mocked Mahler's music, was converted by the "thunderbolt" of Mahler's Third Symphony, which he considered a work of genius. Afterward he "spoke of Mahler as a saint" (Stuckenschmidt 1977, 103; Schoenberg 1975, 136).

In 1898 Schoenberg converted to Christianity in the Lutheran church. In 1933 he entered a Jewish community of faith.^{[citation needed]}

In October 1901, he married Mathilde Zemlinsky, the sister of the conductor and composer Alexander Zemlinsky, with whom Schoenberg had been studying since about 1894. Mathilde bore him two children, Gertrud (1902–1947) and Georg (1906–1974). Gertrud would marry Schoenberg's pupil Felix Greissle in 1921 (Neighbour 2001). During the summer of 1908, his wife Mathilde left him for several months for a young Austrian painter, Richard Gerstl. This period marked a distinct change in Schoenberg's work. It was during the absence of his wife that he composed "You lean against a silver-willow" (German: Du lehnest wider eine Silberweide), the thirteenth song in the cycle Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten, Op. 15, based on the collection of the same name by the German mystical poet Stefan George. This was the first composition without any reference at all to a key (Stuckenschmidt 1977, 96). Also in this year, he completed one of his most revolutionary compositions, the String Quartet No. 2, whose first two movements, though chromatic in color, use traditional key signatures, yet whose final two movements, also settings of George, daringly weaken the links with traditional tonality. Both movements end on tonic chords, and the work is not fully non-tonal. Breaking with previous string-quartet practice, it incorporates a soprano vocal line.

During the summer of 1910, Schoenberg wrote his Harmonielehre (Theory of Harmony, Schoenberg 1922), which remains one of the most influential music-theory books. From about 1911, Schoenberg belonged to a circle of artists and intellectuals who included Lene Schneider-Kainer, Franz Werfel, Herwarth Walden and the latter's wife, Else Lasker-Schüler.

Another of his most important works from this atonal or pantonal period is the highly influential Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21, of 1912, a novel cycle of expressionist songs set to a German translation of poems by the Belgian-French poet Albert Giraud. Utilizing the technique of Sprechstimme, or melodramatically spoken recitation, the work pairs a female vocalist with a small ensemble of five musicians. The ensemble, which is now commonly referred to as the Pierrot ensemble, consists of flute (doubling on piccolo), clarinet (doubling on bass clarinet), violin (doubling on viola), violoncello, speaker, and piano.

Wilhelm Bopp, director of the Vienna Conservatory from 1907, wanted a break from the stale environment personified for him by Robert Fuchs and Hermann Grädener. Having considered many candidates, he offered teaching positions to Schoenberg and Franz Schreker in 1912. At the time Schoenberg lived in Berlin. He was not completely cut off from the Vienna Conservatory, having taught a private theory course a year earlier. He seriously considered the offer, but he declined. Writing afterward to Alban Berg, he cited his "aversion to Vienna" as the main reason for his decision, while contemplating that it might have been the wrong one financially, but having made it he felt content. A couple of months later he wrote to Schreker suggesting that it might have been a bad idea for him as well to accept the teaching position (Hailey 1993, 55–57).

World War I brought a crisis in his development. Military service disrupted his life when at the age of 42 he was in the army. He was never able to work uninterrupted or over a period of time, and as a result he left many unfinished works and undeveloped "beginnings". On one occasion, a superior officer demanded to know if he was "this notorious Schoenberg, then"; Schoenberg replied: "Beg to report, sir, yes. Nobody wanted to be, someone had to be, so I let it be me" (Schoenberg 1975, 104) (according to Norman Lebrecht (2001), this is a reference to Schoenberg's apparent "destiny" as the "Emancipator of Dissonance").

Later, Schoenberg was to develop the most influential version of the dodecaphonic (also known as twelve-tone) method of composition, which in French and English was given the alternative name serialism by René Leibowitz and Humphrey Searle in 1947. This technique was taken up by many of his students, who constituted the so-called Second Viennese School. They included Anton Webern, Alban Berg and Hanns Eisler, all of whom were profoundly influenced by Schoenberg. He published a number of books, ranging from his famous Harmonielehre (Theory of Harmony) to Fundamentals of Musical Composition (Schoenberg 1967), many of which are still in print and used by musicians and developing composers.

Schoenberg's grave in the Zentralfriedhof, Vienna.

Schoenberg viewed his development as a natural progression, and he did not deprecate his earlier works when he ventured into serialism. In 1923 he wrote to the Swiss philanthropist Werner Reinhart: "For the present, it matters more to me if people understand my older works ... They are the natural forerunners of my later works, and only those who understand and comprehend these will be able to gain an understanding of the later works that goes beyond a fashionable bare minimum. I do not attach so much importance to being a musical bogey-man as to being a natural continuer of properly-understood good old tradition!" (Stein 1987, 100; quoted in Strimple 2005, 22)

His first wife died in October 1923, and in August of the next year Schoenberg married Gertrud Kolisch (1898–1967), sister of his pupil, the violinist Rudolf Kolisch (Neighbour 2001; Silverman 2010, 223). She wrote the libretto for Schoenberg's one-act opera Von heute auf morgen under the pseudonym Max Blonda. At her request Schoenberg's (ultimately unfinished) piece, Die Jakobsleiter was prepared for performance by Schoenberg's student Winfried Zillig. After her husband's death in 1951 she founded Belmont Music Publishers devoted to the publication of his works (Shoaf 1992, 64). Arnold used the notes G and E♭ (German: Es, i.e., "S") for "Gertrud Schoenberg", in the Suite, for septet, Op. 29 (1925) (MacDonald 2008, 216).

Following the 1924 death of composer Ferruccio Busoni, who had served as Director of a Master Class in Composition at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin, Schoenberg was appointed to this post the next year, but because of health problems was unable to take up his post until 1926. Among his notable students during this period were the composers Roberto Gerhard, Nikos Skalkottas, and Josef Rufer.

Schoenberg continued in his post until the election of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in 1933. While vacationing in France, he was warned that returning to Germany would be dangerous. Schoenberg formally reclaimed membership in the Jewish religion at a Paris synagogue, then traveled with his family to the United States (Friedrich 1986, 31). His first teaching position in the United States was at the Malkin Conservatory in Boston. He moved to Los Angeles, where he taught at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles, both of which later named a music building on their respective campuses Schoenberg Hall (UCLA Department of Music [2008]; University of Southern California Thornton School of Music [2008]). He settled in Brentwood Park, where he befriended fellow composer (and tennis partner) George Gershwin and began teaching at UCLA. He lived there the rest of his life. Composers Leonard Rosenman and George Tremblay studied with Schoenberg at this time.

During this final period, he composed several notable works, including the difficult Violin Concerto, Op. 36 (1934/36), the Kol Nidre, Op. 39, for chorus and orchestra (1938), the Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, Op. 41 (1942), the haunting Piano Concerto, Op. 42 (1942), and his memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, A Survivor from Warsaw, Op. 46 (1947). He was unable to complete his opera Moses und Aron (1932/33), which was one of the first works of its genre to be written completely using dodecaphonic composition. In 1941, he became a citizen of the United States. During this period, his notable students included John Cage, Lou Harrison, and H. Owen Reed.

Schoenberg experienced triskaidekaphobia (the fear of the number 13), which possibly began in 1908 with the composition of the thirteenth song of the song cycle Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten Op. 15 (Stuckenschmidt 1977, 96). Moses und Aron was originally spelled Moses und Aaron, but when he realised this contained 13 letters, he changed it. His superstitious nature may have triggered his death. According to friend Katia Mann, he feared he would die during a year that was a multiple of 13 (quoted in Lebrecht 1985, 294). He dreaded his sixty-fifth birthday in 1939 so much that a friend asked the composer and astrologer Dane Rudhyar to prepare Schoenberg's horoscope. Rudhyar did this and told Schoenberg that the year was dangerous, but not fatal.

But in 1950, on his seventy-sixth birthday, an astrologer wrote Schoenberg a note warning him that the year was a critical one: 7 + 6 = 13 (Nuria Schoenberg-Nono, quoted in Lebrecht 1985, 295). This stunned and depressed the composer, for up to that point he had only been wary of multiples of 13 and never considered adding the digits of his age. He died on Friday, 13 July 1951, shortly before midnight. Schoenberg stayed in bed — sick, anxious and depressed all day. In a letter to Schoenberg's sister Ottilie, dated 4 August 1951, his wife Gertrud reported, "About a quarter to twelve I looked at the clock and said to myself: another quarter of an hour and then the worst is over. Then the doctor called me. Arnold's throat rattled twice, his heart gave a powerful beat and that was the end" (Stuckenschmidt 1977, 521). Gertrud Schoenberg reported the next day in a telegram to her sister-in-law Ottilie that Arnold died at 11:45 pm (Stuckenschmidt 1977, 520).

Music[link]

Works and ideas[link]

Schoenberg's significant compositions in the repertory of modern art music extend over a period of more than 50 years. Traditionally they are divided into three periods though this division is arguably arbitrary as the music in each of these periods is considerably varied. The idea that his twelve-tone period "represents a stylistically unified body of works is simply not supported by the musical evidence" (Haimo 1990, 4), and important musical characteristics—especially those related to motivic development—transcend these boundaries completely. The first of these periods, 1894–1907, is identified in the legacy of the high-Romantic composers of the late nineteenth century, as well as with "expressionist" movements in poetry and art. The second, 1908–1922, is typified by the abandonment of key centers, a move often described (though not by Schoenberg) as "free atonality". The third, from 1923 onward, commences with Schoenberg's invention of dodecaphonic, or "twelve-tone" compositional method. Schoenberg's most well-known students Hans Eisler, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern, followed Schoenberg faithfully through each of these intellectual and aesthetic transitions, though not without considerable experimentation and variety of approach.

Beginning with songs and string quartets written around the turn of the century, Schoenberg's concerns as a composer positioned him uniquely among his peers, in that his procedures exhibited characteristics of both Brahms and Wagner, who for most contemporary listeners, were considered polar opposites, representing mutually exclusive directions in the legacy of German music. Schoenberg's Six Songs, Op. 3 (1899–1903), for example, exhibit a conservative clarity of tonal organization typical of Brahms and Mahler, reflecting an interest in balanced phrases and an undisturbed hierarchy of key relationships. However, the songs also explore unusually bold incidental chromaticism, and seem to aspire to a Wagnerian "representational" approach to motivic identity. The synthesis of these approaches reaches an apex in his Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4 (1899), a programmatic work for string sextet that develops several distinctive "leitmotif"-like themes, each one eclipsing and subordinating the last. The only motivic elements that persist throughout the work are those that are perpetually dissolved, varied, and re-combined, in a technique, identified primarily in Brahms's music, that Schoenberg called "developing variation". Schoenberg's procedures in the work are organized in two ways simultaneously; at once suggesting a Wagnerian narrative of motivic ideas, as well as a Brahmsian approach to motivic development and tonal cohesion.

Arnold Schoenberg second string quartet, fourth movement, played by the Carmel Quartet with soprano Rona Israel-Kolatt.

Schoenberg's music from 1908 onward experiments in a variety of ways with the absence of traditional keys or tonal centers. His first explicitly atonal piece was the second string quartet, Op. 10, with soprano. The last movement of this piece has no key signature, marking Schoenberg's formal divorce from diatonic harmonies. Other important works of the era include his song cycle Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten, Op. 15 (1908–1909), his Five Orchestral Pieces, Op. 16 (1909), the disturbing Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21 (1912), as well as his dramatic Erwartung, Op. 17 (1909). The urgency of musical constructions lacking in tonal centers, or traditional dissonance-consonance relationships, however, can be traced as far back as his Kammersymphonie, Op. 9 (1906), a work remarkable for its tonal development of whole-tone and quartal harmony, and its initiation of dynamic and unusual ensemble relationships, involving dramatic interruption and unpredictable instrumental allegiances; many of these features would typify the timbre-oriented chamber music aesthetic of the coming century.

File:Schoenberg - Variations for Orchestra op. 31 tone row.png

In Schoenberg's Piano Piece op.31 tone row form P1's second half has the same notes, in a different order, as the first half of I10: "Thus it is possible to employ P1 and I10 simultaneously and in parallel motion without causing note doubling."(Leeuw 2005, 154–55)  Play (help·info)

File:Schoenberg - Variations for Orchestra op. 33 tone row.png

Featuring hexachordal combinatoriality between its primary forms, P1 and I6, Schoenberg's Piano Piece op.33a tone row  Play (help·info) contains three perfect fifths, which is the relation between P1 and I6, and a source of contrast between, "accumulations of 5ths," and, "generally more complex simultaneity" (Leeuw 2005, 155–57). For example group A consists of B♭-F-C-B♮ while the, "more blended," group B consists of A-F♯-C♯-D♯.

In the early 1920s he worked at evolving a means of order which would enable his musical texture to become simpler and clearer, and this resulted in the "method of composing with twelve tones which are related only with one another" (Schoenberg 1984, 218), in which the twelve pitches of the octave (unrealized compositionally) are regarded as equal, and no one note or tonality is given the emphasis it occupied in classical harmony. He regarded it as the equivalent in music of Albert Einstein's discoveries in physics. Schoenberg announced it characteristically, during a walk with his friend Josef Rufer, when he said, "I have made a discovery which will ensure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years" (Stuckenschmidt 1977, 277). This period included the Variations for Orchestra, Op. 31 (1928); Piano Pieces, Opp. 33a & b (1931), and the Piano Concerto, Op. 42 (1942). Contrary to his reputation for strictness, Schoenberg's use of the technique varied widely according to the demands of each individual composition. Thus the structure of his unfinished opera Moses und Aron is unlike that of his Fantasy for Violin and Piano, Op. 47 (1949).

Ten features of Schoenberg's mature twelve-tone practice are characteristic, interdependent, and interactive (Haimo 1990, 41):

1. Hexachordal inversional combinatoriality
2. Aggregates
3. Linear set presentation
4. Partitioning
5. Isomorphic partitioning
6. Invariants
7. Hexachordal levels
8. Harmony, "consistent with and derived from the properties of the referential set"
9. Metre, established through "pitch-relational characteristics"
10. Multidimensional set presentations

Controversies and polemics[link]

Understanding of Schoenberg's twelve-tone work has been difficult to achieve owing in part to the "truly revolutionary nature" of his new system, misinformation disseminated by some early writers about the system's "rules" and "exceptions" which bear "little relation to the most significant features of Schoenberg's music", the composer's secretiveness, and the widespread unavailability of his sketches and manuscripts until the late 1970s. During his life, he was "subjected to a range of criticism and abuse that is shocking even in hindsight" (Haimo 1990, 2–3).

After some understandable early difficulties, Schoenberg began to win public acceptance, with works such as the tone poem Pelleas und Melisande at a Berlin performance in 1907. At the Vienna première of the Gurre-Lieder on 13 February 1913, he received an ovation that lasted a quarter of an hour and culminated with Schoenberg's being presented with a laurel crown (Rosen 1996, 4; Stuckenschmidt 1977, 184). Much of his work, however, was not well received. His Chamber Symphony No. 1 in E major Op. 9, premièred unremarkably in 1907; when it was played again, however, in a 31 March 1913 concert, which also included works by Alban Berg, Anton Webern and Alexander von Zemlinsky, thunderous applause contended with hisses and laughter during Webern's Six Pieces, Op. 6; though Zemlinsky's Four Maeterlinck Songs calmed the audience somewhat (according to a contemporary newspaper report), after Schoenberg's Op. 9 "one could hear the shrill sound of door keys among the violent clapping, and in the second gallery the first fight of the evening began." Later in the concert, during a performance of the Altenberg Lieder by Berg, fighting broke out after Schoenberg interrupted the performance to threaten removal by the police of any troublemakers (Stuckenschmidt 1977, 185). Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, which were to have concluded the concert, had to be canceled after a police officer was called in (Rosen 1996, 5). After this, Schoenberg's music made a break from tonality.

The deteriorating relation between contemporary composers and the public led him to found the Society for Private Musical Performances (Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen in German) in Vienna in 1918. He sought to provide a forum in which modern musical compositions could be carefully prepared and rehearsed, and properly performed under conditions protected from the dictates of fashion and pressures of commerce. From its inception through 1921, when it ended because of economic reasons, the Society presented 353 performances to paid members, sometimes at the rate of one per week. During the first year and a half, Schoenberg did not allow any of his own works to be performed (Rosen 1975, 65). Instead, audiences at the Society's concerts heard difficult contemporary compositions by Scriabin, Debussy, Mahler, Webern, Berg, Reger, and other leading figures of early 20th-century music (Rosen 1996, 66).

Schoenberg's serial technique of composition with twelve notes became one of the most central and polemical issues among American and European musicians during the mid- to late-twentieth century. Beginning in the 1940s and continuing to the present day, composers such as Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono and Milton Babbitt have extended Schoenberg's legacy in increasingly radical directions. The major cities of the United States (e.g., Los Angeles, New York, and Boston) have had historically significant performances of Schoenberg's music, with advocates such as Babbitt in New York and the Franco-American conductor-pianist Jacques-Louis Monod. Schoenberg's students have been influential teachers at major American universities: Leonard Stein at USC, UCLA and CalArts; Richard Hoffmann at Oberlin; Patricia Carpenter at Columbia; and Leon Kirchner and Earl Kim at Harvard). Musicians associated with Schoenberg have had a profound influence upon contemporary music performance practice in the USA (e.g., Louis Krasner, Eugene Lehner and Rudolf Kolisch at the New England Conservatory of Music; Eduard Steuermann and Felix Galimir at the Juilliard School). In Europe, the work of Hans Keller, Luigi Rognoni, and René Leibowitz has had a measurable influence in spreading Schoenberg's musical legacy outside of Germany and Austria.

Schoenberg was not fond of Igor Stravinsky. In 1926 he wrote a poem titled "Der neue Klassizismus" (in which he derogates Neoclassicism and obliquely refers to Stravinsky as "Der kleine Modernsky"), which he used as text for the third of his Drei Satiren, Op. 28 (H. C. Schonberg 1970, 503).

Extramusical interests[link]

Schoenberg was a painter of considerable ability, whose pictures were considered good enough to exhibit alongside those of Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky (Stuckenschmidt 1977, 142). He was interested in Hopalong Cassidy films, which Paul Buhle and David Wagner (2002, v–vii) attribute to the films' left-wing screenwriters—a rather odd claim in light of Schoenberg's statement that he was a "bourgeois" turned monarchist (Stuckenschmidt 1977, 551–52).

Writings[link]

• 1922. Harmonielehre, third edition. Vienna: Universal Edition. (Originally published 1911). Translation by Roy E. Carter, based on the third edition, as Theory of Harmony. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978. ISBN 0-520-04945-4.
• 1959. Structural Functions of Harmony. Translated by Leonard Stein. London: Williams and Norgate Revised edition, New York, London: W. W. Norton and Company 1969. ISBN 0-393-00478-3.
• 1964a. Arnold Schoenberg Letters, selected and edited by Erwin Stein, translated from the original German by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser. London: Faber. Paperback reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. ISBN 978-0-520-06009-8.
• 1964b. Preliminary Exercises in Counterpoint. Edited with a foreword by Leonard Stein. New York, St. Martin's Press. Reprinted, Los Angeles: Belmont Music Publishers 2003.
• 1967. Fundamentals of Musical Composition. Edited by Gerald Strang, with an introduction by Leonard Stein. New York: St. Martin's Press. Reprinted 1985, London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-09276-4
• 1975. Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg. Edited by Leonard Stein, with translations by Leo Black. New York: St. Martins Press; London: Faber & Faber. ISBN 0-520-05294-3. Expanded from the 1950 Philosophical Library (New York) publication edited by Dika Newlin. The volume carries the note "Several of the essays...were originally written in German (translated by Dika Newlin)" in both editions.
• 1979. Die Grundlagen der musikalischen Komposition. Ins Deutsche übertragen von Rudolf Kolisch; hrsg. von Rudolf Stephan. Vienna: Universal Edition (German translation of Fundamentals of Musical Composition).
• 1984. Style and Idea: Selected Writings, translated by Leo Black. Berkeley: California University Press.

Works[link]

See: List of compositions by Arnold Schoenberg

Quotations[link]

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By Schoenberg[link]

• "My music is not lovely" (quoted by Theodor Adorno in his essay "Art and the Arts", 1966, reproduced in Clausen 2008, 387).
• "My music is not modern, it is merely badly played" (Genette 1997, 102).
• "My works are 12-tone compositions, not 12-tone compositions" (Stuckenschmidt 1977, 349).
• "I was never revolutionary. The only revolutionary in our time was Strauss!" (Schoenberg 1975, 137)
• "...if it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art." (Schoenberg 1984, 124)

By others[link]

• Richard Strauss on Schoenberg, written by Schoenberg himself: "Dear Sir, I regret that I am unable to accept your invitation to write something for Richard Strauss's fiftieth birthday. In a letter to Frau Mahler (in connection with Mahler Memorial Fund) Herr Strauss wrote about me as follows: "The only person who can help poor Schoenberg now is a psychiatrist ...". "I think he'd do better to shovel snow instead of scribbling on music-paper...". (Schoenberg, letter to an unknown correspondent, Berlin, 22 April 1914. Schoenberg 1964,^{[page needed]})
• "Non, ce n'est pas de la musique... c'est du laboratoire" ("That isn't music ... it's lab-work" – Maurice Ravel. Mahler 1960,^{[page needed]}).

See also[link]

Biography portal

• Arnold Schönberg Prize

References[link]

• Adorno, Theodor. 1967. Prisms, translated from the German by Samuel and Shierry Weber London: Spearman; Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
• Anon. 2002. "Arnold Schönberg and His God". Vienna: Arnold Schönberg Center.(Accessed 1 December 2008)
• Beaumont, Antony. 2000. Zemlinsky. London: Faber. ISBN 0-571-16983-X Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0-8014-3803-5.
• Buhle, Pal, and David Wagner. 2002. Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story Behind America's Favorite Movies. New York: The New Press. ISBN 1-56584-819-5
• Clausen, Detlev (2008). Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius, translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-02618-6.
• Friedrich, Otto. 1986. City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in 1940's [sic]. New York: Harper & Row. ISBN 0-06-015626-0. Reprinted, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-20949-4.
• Genette, Gérard. 1997. Immanence and Transcendence, translated by G. M. Goshgarian. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ISBN 0-8014-8272-0.
• Greissle-Schönberg, Arnold, and Nancy Bogen. [n.d.] Arnold Schönberg’s European Family (e-book). The Lark Ascending, Inc. (Accessed 2 May 2010)
• Foss, Hubert. 1951. "Schoenberg, 1874–1951" Musical Times 92, no. 1 (September): 401–403.
• Hailey, Christopher. 1993. Franz Schreker, 1878–1934: A Cultural Biography. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-39255-6.
• Haimo, Ethan. 1990. Schoenberg's Serial Odyssey: The Evolution of his Twelve-Tone Method, 1914–1928. Oxford [England]: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press ISBN 0-19-315260-6.
• Lebrecht, Norman. 1985. The Book of Musical Anecdotes. New York: Simon and Schuster; London: Sphere Books. ISBN 0-02-918710-9
• Lebrecht, Norman. 2001. "Why We're Still Afraid of Schoenberg". The Lebrecht Weekly (8 July).
• Leeuw, Ton de. 2005. Music of the Twentieth Century: A Study of Its Elements and Structure, translated from the Dutch by Stephen Taylor. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. ISBN 90-5356-765-8. Translation of Muziek van de twintigste eeuw: een onderzoek naar haar elementen en structuur. Utrecht: Oosthoek, 1964. Third impression, Utrecht: Bohn, Scheltema & Holkema, 1977. ISBN 90-313-0244-9.
• MacDonald, Malcolm. 2008. Schoenberg. The Master Musicians Series. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-517201-0.
• Mahler, Alma. 1960. Mein Leben, with a foreword by Willy Haas. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer.
• Neighbour, O[liver] W. (2001), "Schoenberg [Schönberg], Arnold (Franz Walter)". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan Publishers.
• Rosen, Charles. 1975. Arnold Schoenberg. New York: Viking Press. ISBN 0-670-13316-7 (pbk) ISBN 0-670-01986-0 (cloth). Reprinted 1996, with a new preface. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-72643-6
• Ross, Alex. 2007. And the Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, ISBN 978-0-374-24939-7
• Schonberg, Harold C. 1970. The Lives of the Great Composers. New York: W. W. Norton. ISBN 0-393-02146-7 (Revised ed., New York: W. W. Norton, 1980. ISBN 0-393-01302-2 Third ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. ISBN 0-393-03857-2)
• Schoenberg, Arnold. 1922. Harmonielehre, third edition. Vienna: Universal Edition. (Originally published 1911). Translation by Roy E. Carter, based on the third edition, as Theory of Harmony. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978. ISBN 0-520-04945-4.
• Schoenberg, Arnold. 1959. Structural Functions of Harmony. Translated by Leonard Stein. London: Williams and Norgate Revised edition, New York, London: W. W. Norton and Company 1969. ISBN 0-393-00478-3.
• Schoenberg, Arnold. 1964. Arnold Schoenberg Letters, selected and edited by Erwin Stein, translated from the original German by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser. London: Faber. Paperback reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. ISBN 978-0-520-06009-8.
• Schoenberg, Arnold. 1967. Fundamentals of Musical Composition. Edited by Gerald Strang, with an introduction by Leonard Stein. New York: St. Martin's Press. Reprinted 1985, London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-09276-4
• Schoenberg, Arnold. 1975. Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg. Edited by Leonard Stein, with translations by Leo Black. New York: St. Martins Press; London: Faber & Faber. ISBN 0-520-05294-3. Expanded from the 1950 Philosophical Library (New York) publication edited by Dika Newlin. The volume carries the note "Several of the essays...were originally written in German (translated by Dika Newlin)" in both editions.
• Schoenberg, Arnold. 1984. Style and Idea: Selected Writings, translated by Leo Black. Berkeley: California University Press.
• Steinberg, Michael. 1995. The Symphony: A Listener's Guide. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-506177-2 (cloth) ISBN 0-19-512665-3 (pbk)
• Shoaf, R. Wayne. 1992. "Satellite Collections in the Archive of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute". Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 15, no. 1 (June): 9–110.
• Silverman, Kenneth. 2010. Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage. ISBN 978-1-4000-4437-5.^{[Full citation needed]}
• Strimple, Nick. 2005. Choral Music in the Twentieth Century. Portland, Oregon & Cambridge, UK: Amadeus. ISBN 1-57467-122-7
• Stuckenschmidt, Hans Heinz. 1977. Schoenberg: His Life, World and Work. Translated from the German by Humphrey Searle. New York: Schirmer Books.
• UCLA Department of Music. [2008]. "Facilities and Maintenance". (Accessed 1 December 2008)
• University of Southern California Thornton School of Music. [2008]. "Performance Halls and Studios". (Accessed 1 December 2008)
• Worldspace Radio. 2007. Maestro "Concert Hall Presentation". 13 July 2007; Featured piece.^{[citation needed]}

Further reading[link]

• Auner, Joseph. 1993. A Schoenberg Reader. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-09540-6.
• Boulez, Pierre. 1991. "Schoenberg is Dead" (1952). In his Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship, collected and presented by Paule Thévenin, translated by Stephen Walsh, with an introduction by Robert Piencikowski, 209–14. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-311210-8.
• Brand, Julianne, Christopher Hailey, and Donald Harris (editors). 1987. The Berg-Schoenberg Correspondence: Selected Letters. New York, London: W. W. Norton and Company. ISBN 0-393-01919-5.
• Byron, Avior. 2006. "The Test Pressings of Schoenberg Conducting Pierrot lunaire: Sprechstimme Reconsidered". Music Theory Online 12, no. 1 (February). http://www.societymusictheory.org/mto/issues/mto.06.12.1/mto.06.12.1.byron_frames.html
• Everdell, William R.. 1998 The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Eybl, Martin. 2004. Die Befreiung des Augenblicks: Schönbergs Skandalkonzerte von 1907 und 1908: eine Dokumentation. Wiener Veröffentlichungen zur Musikgeschichte 4. Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau. ISBN 3-205-77103-6.
• Gur, Golan. 2009. "Arnold Schoenberg and the Ideology of Progress in Twentieth-Century Musical Thinking". Search: Journal for New Music and Culture 5 (Summer). Online journal (Accessed 17 October 2011).
• Hyde, Martha M. 1982. Schoenberg's Twelve-Tone Harmony: The Suite Op. 29 and the Compositional Sketches. Studies in Musicology, series edited by George Buelow. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. ISBN 0-8357-1512-4.
• Kandinsky, Wassily. 2000. "Arnold Schönberg als Maler/Arnold Schönberg as Painter". Journal of the Arnold Schönberg Center, no. 1:131–76.
• Meyer, Esther da Costa. 2003. "Schoenberg's Echo: The Composer as Painter". In Schoenberg, Kandinsky, and the Blue Rider, edited by Fred Wasserman and Esther da Costa Meyer, foreword by Joan Rosenbaum, preface by Christian Meyer. London and New York: Scala. ISBN 1-85759-312-X
• Rollet, Philippe (ed.). 2010. Arnold Schönberg: Visions et regards, with a preface by Frédéric Chambert and Alain Mousseigne. Montreuil-sous-Bois: Liénart. ISBN 978-2-35906-028-7.
• Shawn, Allen. 2002. Arnold Schoenberg's Journey. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux. ISBN 0-374-10590-1.
• Weiss, Adolph. 1932. "The Lyceum of Schonberg", Modern Music 9, no. 3 (March–April): 99–107.
• Wright, James K. 2007. Schoenberg, Wittgenstein, and the Vienna Circle. Bern: Verlag Peter Lang. ISBN 978-3-03911-287-6.
• Wright, James and Alan Gillmor (eds.). 2009. Schoenberg's Chamber Music, Schoenberg's World. New York: Pendragon Press. ISBN 978-1-57647-130-2.

Recordings by Schoenberg[link]

• recordings at archive.org
• Video and audio as part of musicology studies

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Arnold Schoenberg

• Arnold Schoenberg Center in Vienna
• Biographical Timeline at the Arnold Schoenberg Center
• (French) A biography of Arnold Schoenberg, from IRCAM's website.
• Complete Schoenberg Discography & List of Works

• Music in the Air : 6 Kleine Klavierstucke op.19
• The Lied, Art Song, and Choral Texts Archive Created and maintained by Emily Ezust Texts of the poems set in music by Schoenberg with translations in various languages.

Writings about Schoenberg

• Contemporary account on Schoenberg by James Huneker from his work Ivory Apes and Peacocks (1917)
• An Interview with Schoenberg's children (2008) by Avior Byron
• "How Arnold Schoenberg Became Lonely: Imagination versus Reality", Sabine Feisst, Berfrois (2011)

Sheetmusic

• Free scores by Arnold Schoenberg at the International Music Score Library Project

Sound-files

• Excerpts from sound archives of Schoenberg's works.

Pierre Boulez in 2004

Pierre Boulez (French pronunciation: [pjɛʁ bu.lɛːz]) (born 26 March 1925) is a French composer of contemporary classical music, a pianist, and a conductor.

Biography[link]

Early years[link]

Boulez was born in Montbrison, Loire, France. As a child he began piano lessons and demonstrated aptitude in both music and mathematics. He pursued the latter at Lyon before pursuing music at the Paris Conservatoire under Olivier Messiaen and the wife of Arthur Honegger, Andrée Vaurabourg.^[1]

Through Messiaen, Boulez discovered twelve-tone technique — which he would later study privately with René Leibowitz — and went on to write atonal music in a post-Webernian serial style.^[2] Boulez was initially part of a cadre of early supporters of Leibowitz, but due to an altercation with Leibowitz, their relations turned divisive, as Boulez spent much of his career promoting the music of Messiaen instead.

The first fruits of this were his cantatas Le visage nuptial and Le soleil des eaux for female voices and orchestra, both composed in the late 1940s and revised several times since, as well as the Second Piano Sonata of 1948, a well-received 32-minute work that Boulez composed at the age of 23. Thereafter, Boulez was influenced by Messiaen's research to extend twelve-tone technique beyond the realm of pitch organization, serialising durations, dynamics, mode of attack, and so on. This technique became known as integral serialism.