Word: schoenberger
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When he was 16, Vienna-born Arnold Schoenberg decided to become a professional musician. Nine years later, in 1899, he completed a string sextet, Transfigured Night, a melodic, romantic piece, which was to be one of his few works familiar to concertgoers. Critics applauded the newcomer...
From that time on, Schoenberg continued to attract attention, but it was increasingly of a different kind. He became the apostle of a musical-intellectual game which made him the most controversial innovator in 20th Century music...
...Harmonies. Where other composers were satisfied with the conventional scale of seven basic tones (do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti), Schoenberg insisted on discarding "key" and exploring the potential scale of twelve tones (i.e., the full chromatic scale in an octave). The result hurt people's ears. "Just dissonance," they said, or, more simply, "Just noise." Schoenberg stuck to his guns, demanded the "emancipation of dissonance." Discords can become new harmonies, he said. He found a few disciples. The best known: Alban Berg, composer of the twelve-tone opera Wozzeck (TIME, April 23). New music, Schoenberg insisted, "must...
...Must Be Heard." Schoenberg lived in the U.S. 18 years, eight of them as a member (1936-44) of U.C.L.A.'s music faculty. Here & there, pianists occasionally programmed Schoenberg music, vocalists sang his songs, orchestras and chamber groups performed his longer works, e.g., the symphonic poem Pelleas and Melisande, the melodrama Pierrot Lunaire and Gurre-Lieder, songs for voice and chamber orchestra. To all but his most devoted fans, the music still sounded harsh. But Schoenberg never once let up in his battle for his twelve-tone system...
...Schoenberg's final place in music history may not be determined for a long time. Even he realized that. "I do not know my destiny," he once said, though he comforted himself with the idea that he might be ranked near...