Nuria schoenberg biography of christopher

Austrian-American composer (1874–1951)

"Schoenberg" redirects here. For others with the surname, see Schoenberg (surname).

Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg (13 September 1874 – 13 July 1951) was an Austrian and American composer, music theorist, teacher and writer. He was among the first modernists who transformed the practice of harmony in 20th-century classical music, and a central element of his music was its use of motives as a means of coherence. He propounded concepts like developing variation, the emancipation of the dissonance, and the "unity of musical space".

Schoenberg's early works, like Verklärte Nacht (1899), represented a Brahmsian–Wagnerian synthesis on which he built. Mentoring Anton Webern and Alban Berg, he became the central figure of the Second Viennese School. They consorted with visual artists, published in Der Blaue Reiter, and wrote atonal, expressionist music, attracting fame and stirring debate. In his String Quartet No. 2 (1907–1908), Erwartung (1909), and Pierrot lunaire (1912), Schoenberg visited extremes of emotion; in self-portraits he emphasized his intense gaze. While working on Die Jakobsleiter (from 1914) and Moses und Aron (from 1923), Schoenberg confronted popular antisemitism by returning to Judaism and substantially developed his twelve-tone technique. He systematically interrelated all notes of the chromatic scale in his twelve-tone music, often exploiting combinatorial hexachords and sometimes admitting tonal elements.

Schoenberg resigned from the Prussian Academy of Arts (1926–1933), emigrating as the

A Feisstian View of Schoenberg in America

Just as I completed reading Sabine Feisst’s excellent Schoenberg’s New World – the American Years, the Times Literary Supplement asked if I would review two new books on Schoenberg. I won’t give away any trade secrets, but as the TLS didn’t review Prof. Feisst’s book, I thought I would write it up on the Forbidden Music blog – not as a review, but as an over-view of what I consider a very important piece of ‘exile’ scholarship. As so frequently when focusing on a single composer, writers can fail to see the threads of commonality that exist between groups who faced similar situations. In many ways, her book is as relevant to Schoenberg as it is for say, Ernst Toch, or Ernst Krenek. There are even some similarities with the experiences of Kurt Weill, Erich Korngold and Hanns Eisler, all of whom, like Schoenberg, managed to avoid the destitution of Alexander Zemlinsky and Béla Bartók.

(Schoenberg’s Fanfare for the Hollywood Bowl based on Gurrelieder, commissioned by Leopold Stokowski and completed by Leonard Stein for its premiere in 1977)

Sabine Feisst sets out to refute beyond all reasonable doubt the European-centric view that Arnold Schoenberg was poor, forgotten, unappreciated and alone in what Krenek called the ‘echoless’ United States. The European view of Schoenberg in America is hardly lightweight: Theodor W. Adorno, who was critical of Schoenberg, especially his 12 tone technique (or ‘method’, whichever you prefer), had a number of intellectual axes to grind. He found in Thomas Mann the perfect axe-grinder and supplied much of the background information for Mann’s Doktor Faustus, the central character of which is a composer who comes up with the means of composing using 12 tones after making a syphilitic pact with

Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg (German: 13 September 1874 – 13 July 1951) was an Austrian-American composer, music theorist, teacher, writer, and painter. He is widely considered one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School. As a Jewish composer, Schoenberg was targeted by the Nazi Party, which labeled his works as degenerate music and forbade them from being published. He emigrated to the United States in 1933, becoming an American citizen in 1941.

Schoenberg's approach, both in terms of harmony and development, has shaped much of 20th-century musical thought. Many composers from at least three generations have consciously extended his thinking, whereas others have passionately reacted against it.

Schoenberg was known early in his career for simultaneously extending the traditionally opposed German Romantic styles of Brahms and Wagner. Later, his name would come to personify innovations in atonality (although Schoenberg himself detested that term) that would become the most polemical feature of 20th-century classical music. In the 1920s, Schoenberg developed the twelve-tone technique, an influential compositional method of manipulating an ordered series of all twelve notes in the chromatic scale. He also coined the term developing variation and was the first modern composer to embrace ways of developing motifs without resorting to the dominance of a centralized melodic idea.

Schoenberg was also an influential teacher of composition; his students included Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Hanns Eisler, Egon Wellesz, Nikos Skalkottas and later John Cage, Lou Harrison, Earl Kim, Robert Gerhard, Leon Kirchner, Dika Newlin, Oscar Levant, and other prominent musicians. Many of Schoenberg's practices, including the formalization of compositional method and his habit of openly inviting audiences to think analytically, are ech