Schoenberg & Serialism
Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951)
Arnold Schoenberg invented the most controversial musical system of the 20th century. Beginning as a late Romantic, he developed free atonality, then codified the 12-tone method — a rigorous system to replace the tonal hierarchy that had dissolved. His music is still violently debated. His influence on subsequent composers is undeniable.
Schoenberg's Three Periods
Life & Context
Arnold Schoenberg was born in Vienna on 13 September 1874, the son of a shoe-shop owner. Largely self-taught as a composer, he absorbed the tradition of Wagner and Brahms before beginning to move beyond it. His early works — the string sextet Verklarte Nacht (1899) and the mammoth choral work Gurrelieder (begun 1900) — are late Romantic masterpieces, lush and chromatic but still tonal.
By 1908, Schoenberg had crossed a threshold that he himself described as the "emancipation of the dissonance." In the Three Piano Pieces Op. 11 and the Five Pieces for Orchestra Op. 16, he abandoned the tonal system entirely — no key signature, no tonic, no hierarchy between consonance and dissonance. All twelve chromatic notes became equal.
After a decade of free atonality, Schoenberg felt the need for a new organising principle. In 1921 he privately told his students: "I have discovered something that will guarantee the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years." This was the 12-tone method, first used systematically in the Suite for Piano Op. 25 (1923).
As a Jew in Austria, Schoenberg was in danger as soon as Hitler came to power in 1933. He emigrated to the United States, settling in Los Angeles (near Stravinsky, with whom he maintained a famous non-relationship — they lived a few miles apart and never once met). He died in Los Angeles on 13 July 1951, his unfinished opera Moses und Aron still incomplete.
"My music is not modern. It is merely badly played."
— Arnold Schoenberg
Period I: The Late Romantic (1897–1907)
Verklarte Nacht (Transfigured Night), Op. 4 (1899)
Written for string sextet (later arranged for string orchestra), this is Schoenberg's most beloved and performed work. A tone poem based on a poem by Richard Dehmel about a woman who confesses to her lover that she is pregnant by another man — and her lover's loving response. The music is intensely chromatic and emotionally charged, the most Wagnerian thing Schoenberg ever wrote. It is also simply beautiful.
Gurrelieder (Songs of Gurre), 1900/1911
A massive cantata for five soloists, three choruses, and an enormous orchestra (requiring extra pages for its 140-player score). Based on Danish medieval poetry, it tells of King Waldemar's love for the slain Tove. The score requires five flutes, two sets of timpani, and four harps. Schoenberg began it in 1900 in his most Romantic style; by the time he orchestrated it in 1911, he had already moved into atonality — meaning he had to write a piece whose language he had left behind.
Period II: Free Atonality (1908–1922)
The "emancipation of the dissonance" meant that chords which in tonal music required resolution were now free to stand alone. Schoenberg argued that what was "dissonant" was merely unfamiliar — given time, listeners would come to accept the 12-note chromatic scale as a natural harmonic space. This proved optimistic.
Three Piano Pieces, Op. 11 (1909)
The first fully atonal works in the Western canon. Short, compressed, with rapid changes of texture and mood. The listener can no longer orient by key; the pieces feel suspended in harmonic space.
Erwartung (Expectation), Op. 17 (1909)
A 30-minute monodrama for soprano and orchestra — a woman searches for her lover in a forest and finds his murdered body. Schoenberg composed it in 17 days. It is one of the most concentrated expressions of anguish in Western music, and has no recurring motifs, no structure other than the libretto. Pure stream-of-consciousness musical Expressionism.
Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21 (1912)
A song cycle for "Sprechstimme" (speech-voice) — a half-singing, half-speaking vocal technique — with chamber ensemble (flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano). 21 poems by Albert Giraud about Pierrot, the commedia dell'arte clown. Schoenberg's most performed atonal work, it combines cabaret, Expressionism, and contrapuntal sophistication. The Sprechstimme technique was highly influential: it marks an exact point of notation on the stave but instructs the singer to immediately slide away from it, creating a ghostly, uncanny quality.
Period III: The 12-Tone Method (1923–1951)
The 12-tone (or dodecaphonic) method was Schoenberg's solution to the problem of free atonality: music without a tonal centre had no organising principle, no equivalent to the key that could unify a long composition. The tone row provided that principle.
The Tone Row
A tone row is an ordering of all 12 notes of the chromatic scale, with no note repeated. This row is used as the basis for the entire composition. The composer can use the row in four forms:
Example Tone Row: Schoenberg, Piano Suite Op. 25
Suite for Piano, Op. 25 (1923)
The first composition to consistently apply the 12-tone method throughout. A suite of six pieces in Baroque dance forms (Prelude, Gavotte, Musette, Intermezzo, Minuet, Gigue) — deliberately archaic forms filled with radical harmonic content. The contrast between ancient form and new language is pointed.
Variations for Orchestra, Op. 31 (1928)
The first major 12-tone orchestral work — a 20-minute set of variations of symphonic scope and ambition. Shows that the 12-tone method could sustain extended large-scale argument, not just miniatures.
Moses und Aron (1932, incomplete)
Schoenberg's unfinished opera about Moses and Aaron. Two acts were composed; the third was sketched but never set to music. The opera asks: can the unnameable, unknowable God (Moses) be communicated through the compromised language of art and image (Aaron)? It is simultaneously a theological meditation and a meditation on the limits of musical language. It remains one of the most important unfinished works in the repertoire.
The Second Viennese School
Schoenberg's two most important pupils, Alban Berg and Anton Webern, took the 12-tone technique in very different directions. Together with Schoenberg they constitute the Second Viennese School (the first being Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven).
Alban Berg (1885–1935)
Berg used the 12-tone method with an emotional warmth that Schoenberg often withheld. His Violin Concerto (1935) uses a tone row that quotes a Bach chorale — the ancient and the modern entwined. His opera Wozzeck (1925) is a masterpiece of Expressionist theatre and one of the most performed 20th-century operas. He died at 50 from blood poisoning, leaving his second opera Lulu unfinished.
Anton Webern (1883–1945)
Where Berg expanded the 12-tone method, Webern compressed it to an extreme. His pieces are typically 1-3 minutes long and use silence as a structural element. His late works foreshadow total serialism — the application of serial technique to rhythm, dynamics, and timbre as well as pitch. Accidentally shot by an American soldier in 1945 while lighting a cigar after curfew. Boulez and the post-war avant-garde revered him above Schoenberg himself.
Legacy & the Century's Most Contested Idea
After World War II, a generation of composers treated serialism as the only legitimate path. Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono, and Milton Babbitt extended serialist principles into total serialism — organising not just pitch but rhythm, dynamics, timbre, and density by serial techniques. The Darmstadt summer school (founded 1946) became the centre of this movement.
The high-serialist period (roughly 1950-1975) produced music of extraordinary complexity and almost complete inaccessibility to general audiences. Concert audiences declined sharply; the gap between composers and listeners became a chasm. Some composers doubled down on difficulty as a point of principle. Others began to look for a way out.
From the 1970s, a gradual reaction set in: minimalism (Reich, Glass, Adams), spectralism, neo-Romanticism, and postmodernism all represented, in different ways, a rejection of strict serialism and a return to the possibility of beauty, repetition, and emotional directness. The battle continues.
"Serialism was the only possible solution after Wagner. But perhaps it was also a dead end."
— Pierre Boulez, in an interview, c. 1975
The End of the Common Practice Period
This chapter ends the main arc of the course. From Monteverdi's invention of opera in 1600 to Schoenberg's systematic dissolution of tonality in 1923, Western classical music had been, despite all its internal diversity, a single conversation — one that took place in a shared harmonic language. The common practice period was the period in which composers shared tonal grammar even while disagreeing about everything else.
Schoenberg ended that shared grammar. After 1923, there was no consensus language. This was liberating and catastrophic simultaneously — the freedom to compose in any style produced a fragmentation that has never fully resolved. The 20th century's music is not a continuation of the conversation that ran from Monteverdi to Brahms. It is the aftermath of that conversation's conclusion.
Whether this was a tragedy, a necessary evolution, or the opening of new possibilities that are still being explored — this is the question that every serious composer and music-lover must answer for themselves.