Arnold Schoenberg Simulacrum

The Life

Arnold Schoenberg was born in Vienna in 1874 into a lower-middle-class Jewish family — his father kept a shoe shop, his mother had been a trained pianist — and he was largely self-taught as a composer. He took counterpoint lessons from Alexander Zemlinsky in his late teens (and later married Zemlinsky’s sister), and Zemlinsky remained his only formal teacher. By the turn of the century he was earning a precarious living in Vienna as an orchestrator and music editor. His early major works — the string sextet Verklärte Nacht of 1899, the massive oratorio Gurrelieder begun in 1900, the First Chamber Symphony of 1906, the Second String Quartet of 1908 — carried the chromatic expansion of late Romanticism to the edge of tonal coherence.

The decisive break came in 1908–1909, with the Three Piano Pieces Op. 11 and the song cycle Das Buch der hängenden Gärten on poems by Stefan George: music no longer organised by tonal hierarchy, which Schoenberg himself called “pantonal” and refused to call “atonal.” A period of free atonality followed — the Five Orchestral Pieces Op. 16 (1909), Erwartung (1909), Pierrot Lunaire (1912) — and in the early 1920s, after a long silence, he worked out what he called the method of composing with twelve tones related only to one another. The Suite Op. 25 (1921–1923) was the first completed twelve-tone work. He taught composition privately, then at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin from 1925; his pupils, including Alban Berg and Anton Webern, constituted with him what became known as the Second Viennese School. In 1933, on the Nazi seizure of power, he was dismissed from the Prussian Academy, travelled to Paris (where he formally returned to Judaism), and emigrated to the United States the same year. From 1936 until his retirement he taught at UCLA, and died in Los Angeles in 1951. The opera Moses und Aron, on the impossibility of representing the God of the Hebrew Scriptures, remained unfinished.

The Thought

Schoenberg’s theoretical position turned on a distinctive argument from historical necessity. In the Harmonielehre (1911), which remains his central theoretical work, he rejected the view — Rameau’s corps sonore, Zarlino’s senario — that the rules of tonal harmony expressed natural laws. They expressed, rather, a historically developed set of conventions which had worked for three centuries and which, by the early twentieth, had exhausted their expressive possibilities. The “emancipation of the dissonance” was not a choice to reject tradition but the next step in a long historical process by which intervals once heard as dissonant (the thirds of the Renaissance, the sevenths of the Baroque, the unresolved chromaticism of Tristan) had gradually become comprehensible to ears trained by the music that used them. His own work extended this process to completion: in music that no longer required the resolution of any dissonance, because the ear had been educated to hear all twelve pitch classes as mutually related.

The twelve-tone method, developed in the early 1920s, was his response to the problem of maintaining musical coherence after the tonal system had been abandoned. A row — an ordering of all twelve pitch classes — supplied the pitch material of a work; the row could be transposed, inverted, reversed, or both reversed and inverted, giving forty-eight forms; no pitch class was to recur until all twelve had sounded. The method organised pitch; it determined nothing else. Schoenberg insisted, more carefully than his later disciples, that the row was like a key signature, establishing conditions within which the composer’s imagination was entirely free: rhythm, dynamics, timbre, texture, form, and phrase structure remained to be invented afresh in every work. Beneath these innovations ran a deeply conservative self-understanding. He was not a revolutionary breaking with the Western tradition but its next link: Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Schoenberg. His 1947 essay “Brahms the Progressive” made the polemical case that Brahms, rather than Wagner, was the true forward-looking composer of the nineteenth century — precisely because Brahms’s technique of developing variation (entwickelnde Variation), in which each phrase grew organically from its predecessor through the transformation of a basic shape (Grundgestalt), anticipated the motivic economy that twelve-tone composition required. The musical idea (musikalischer Gedanke) was, for Schoenberg, the organising principle of every serious composition: a tension or problem presented at the opening that the form of the work existed to work out and resolve.

The Legacy

Schoenberg is, with Stravinsky, one of the two central composers of twentieth-century Western art music, and his theoretical writings have a standing independent of his scores. The Harmonielehre is still read, both as the culminating treatise of chromatic tonal theory and as the philosophical argument for its exhaustion. The later pedagogical works — Structural Functions of Harmony (1954), Fundamentals of Musical Composition (1967), Preliminary Exercises in Counterpoint (1963), all edited from lecture notes and teaching materials after his death — remain standard composition-pedagogy texts. The collection Style and Idea (1950, expanded 1975) contains the essays through which his aesthetic is most widely encountered.

His direct theoretical influence flows through the Second Viennese School to Milton Babbitt and the American academic serialists of the 1950s and 1960s, whose total-serial project he regarded with ambivalence as an extension of his method beyond its intended scope. His most consequential theoretical opponent, within the German tradition, is Heinrich Schenker; the two represent the great split of twentieth-century music theory, both claiming the German tradition and Brahms in particular, both reaching opposite conclusions about what that tradition now required. The split has not been resolved and probably cannot be: what Schenker regarded as the destruction of music, Schoenberg regarded as the only honest way to continue it.