Music of Arnold Schoenberg

During the first part of the past century, Arnold
Schoenberg (1874-1951) revolutionized the
contemporary music scene more profoundly than
anyone else. With his independent, courageous and
radical set of mind and with his extraordinary
ability to understand and carry out the historic
mission suggested by the musical material itself,
he expanded the harmonic language far beyond the
borders of tonality, pioneering free atonality
and the 'emancipation of dissonance' in his music
written during the first two decades of the 20th
century, before introducing the new technique of
dodecaphonic serialism (his 'method of composing
with twelve tones which are related only with one
another') during the early 1920s. The course will
combine biography, music theory, analysis, score
study, guided listening and aesthetic discussion
in order to yield an overview of Schoenberg's
life, work and historical influence and an
appreciation of his supreme compositional metier
and creative imagination, his intimate knowledge
of the Classical masters and the Romantic
tradition, and of the unique profundity of his
thought. In discussing his 12-tone-method, we
shall see that this surprising and controversial
innovation was actually just a radical
continuation of the inherited principle of
'developing variation', while at the same time
constituting as it were the vertex or 'historical
fulfillment' of the present tone system of
12-tone Equal Temperament.