Word: schoenberg
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Schoenberg's famous twelve-tone system liberated music, not from tonality as is commonly claimed, but, less ominously, from the ancient laws of harmony. His system represented not the loss of all order but the penetration to a simpler more elastic and potentially liberating order...
...entire community of Europe agonied in the punishing ascendency of the magnificent nineteenth century figures: Beethoven, Wagner, Brahms, Metternich, Bismarck, Darwin. Music was caught in a vortex of gigantic, lavish attempts at the final romantic masterpiece. Mahler's Eighth Symphony, Richard Strauss's Symphonia Domestica and Alpine Symphony, Schoenberg's Pelleas and Melisande and Gurre-Lieder, Scriabin's Poem of Ecstasy were all part of an increasingly grotesque effort to revitalize the nineteenth century musical syntax. Munificently colored cathedrals were raised upon the collapsing sands of lurid fin-de-siecle romanticism. Self-paralysis, excruciating self-examination, and creative resumption along...
...against such a stark panorama that Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, and Debussy, their earlier counterpart in the reformation of sensibility, labored to form a musical, syntax of more penetrating and living poetry. Richard Strauss's famous boast that he could set a glass of beer to music contrasts sharply with Debussy's later response to his world...
...essence of Schoenberg, Debussy, Berg, and Webern was the acute, almost palpable response to the most minute patterns of life. They expressed this in a new voice of polychromatic sounds of momentary durations. The fluid immediacy of impresssonism and the starker psychology of expressionism began to lose their distinctiveness and prove permeable and complementary. The last magnificent statements of the musical expressionistic esthetic were Alban Berg's operas Wozzeck (1921) and Lulu (1935), and his Violin Concerto (1935), an elegy written upon the death on Mahler's daughter Manon. The neurasthenic romanticism of Mahler was transmuted in these works...
AFTER THE DEATH of Berg in 1936 many composers began an impulsive dizzying concatenation of extreme experiments. Schoenberg himself continued writing masterworks until his death in continued writing masterworks until his death in 1951. The younger radicals seized upon his abstract serial period of the 1920's and upon the exceedingly astringent works of the meticulous Anton Webern astringent works of the meticulous Anton Webern (1883-1945), as their sources of inspiration. The genuinely revolutionary effect of the turn-of-the-century ferment, and the principle which has animated today's avant-garde, was that expressionism and impressionism were subsumed...