Arnold Schoenberg: Beauty and horror
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Arnold Schoenberg: Beauty and horror
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Re: Arnold Schoenberg: Beauty and horror
#2For those who don't know who Schoenberg is: he's a composer of "abstract" music. Think of a musical equivalent to the abstract art. https://youtu.be/2V-qmC6xUW8
Re: Arnold Schoenberg: Beauty and horror
#3This music will destroy you. He barely survived it himself.
Very skilled though... Hit it a time or two on YouTube, then move on. Don't linger!
Re: Arnold Schoenberg: Beauty and horror
#4Schoenberg'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.
Re: Arnold Schoenberg: Beauty and horror
#5This music will destroy you. He barely survived it himself. Very skilled though... Hit it a time or two on YouTube, then move on. Don't linger!
That sounds like a challenge. Are there any particular pieces you would recommend I don't spend too long on?
Re: Arnold Schoenberg: Beauty and horror
#6This music will destroy you. He barely survived it himself. Very skilled though... Hit it a time or two on YouTube, then move on. Don't linger!
That sounds like a challenge. Are there any particular pieces you would recommend I don't spend too long on?
If you can play the piano, some of the six little pieces op 19 are quite easy.
Re: Arnold Schoenberg: Beauty and horror
#7For those who don't know who Schoenberg is: he's a composer of "abstract" music. Think of a musical equivalent to the abstract art. https://youtu.be/2V-qmC6xUW8
It is worth noting that Wassily Kandinsky reached out to Schönberg because he saw parallels in Schönberg's music to his own abstract art. But I think this parallel only exists in terms of breaking with the conventions and traditions of the medium, i.e. mimesis in visual arts and tonality in (Western) music. One could argue that music is always "abstract" in the sense that there is no real model in nature which it can abstract from. After all, music is always artificial.
Re: Arnold Schoenberg: Beauty and horror
#8Schoenberg'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 m…
> 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).
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.
Re: Arnold Schoenberg: Beauty and horror
#9Schoenberg'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 m…
> 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 ). Before that, the music of Wagner already shook the foundations of Western tonali…
You 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.
Re: Arnold Schoenberg: Beauty and horror
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 ). Before that, the music of Wagner already shook the foundations of Western tonali…
You 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.
The 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.