As far as public familiarity goes, composer Arnold Schoenberg really doesn’t rise to the level of Mozart or Beethoven, Debussy or Mahler. But he was a radical innovator, overturning centuries-old ideas about scales and keys and tonality. He changed the was music sounded in the 20th century, even the way it was thought about.
He wrote some very experimental pieces. The word used to describe them is often “atonal” which basically means music without a key signature. In Western music melodies are usually written in a particular key. That means that they’re made up of eight notes that go together and sound right together. There are 12 possible notes between, say, a C and a C, but only 8 of them fit together in a way that sounds right to our ears. You can change one, maybe two, and a piece will sound a little off, what you might call “bluesy.” But what Schoenberg did was compose in a way that gave equal weight to all twelve notes available between octaves. It came to be called 12-tone music. Once you start to get used to it, it can make other styles sound a little bit predictable. He called modernists like Bizet and ravel “mediocre kitschmongers.” They didn’t go far enough, he thought.
Schoenberg was born in Vienna in 1874 back when it was the premiere city of the Austro-Hungarian empire. His father was a shopkeeper and his mother taught piano. The family was Jewish, although through his life he converted to Christianity and then later back to Judaism.
By the first decade of the 20th century he was composing some really groundbreaking stuff. He also wrote a revolutionary book on harmony in the summer of 1910. Despite his age he served in the army in World War One, by which time he was already well-known as a composer. In the 1920s he was Director of a Master Class in Composition at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin.
When the Nazis seized power in Germany, Schoenberg saw the writing on the wall at once. He resigned his position and fled to the United States. A few years later the party banned his compositions as degenerate. (He had a lot of company in that classification.) When Schoenberg arrived in the US he stayed in Boston for a while and taught music at Boston University. But like so many other emegres he wound up in Los Angeles. He taught at UCLA from 1936 to 1944.
All the while he continued to compose music. Hollywood composers picked up a lot of his influences for movie soundtracks. He died in July 1951 in Los Angeles. He’s back in the news today, and not for the reasons you might think. Let’s find out why next week.