Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg was an Austrian-born composer, music theorist, teacher, writer, and painter. He is widely considered one of the most important and 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. With the rise of the Nazi Party, Schoenberg's works were labeled degenerate music, because they were modernist and atonal. He emigrated to the United States in 1933, becoming an American citizen in 1941.
Schoenberg's approach, bοth in terms of harmony and development, has been one of the most influential of 20th-century musical thought. Many European and American 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 that would become the most polemical feature of 20th-century art 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, Stefania Turkewich, and later John Cage, Lou Harrison, Earl Kim, Robert Gerhard, Leon Kirchner, Dika Newlin, 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 echoed in avant-garde musical thought throughout the 20th century. His often polemical views of music history and aesthetics were crucial to many significant 20th-century musicologists and critics, including Theodor W. Adorno, Charles Rosen, and Carl Dahlhaus, as well as the pianists Artur Schnabel, Rudolf Serkin, Eduard Steuermann, and Glenn Gould.
Schoenberg's archival legacy is collected at the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna.
Wikipedia
“…if it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art.”
from New Music, Outmoded Music, Style and Idea (1946); as quoted in Style and Idea (1985), p. 124
1940s
“I was never revolutionary. The only revolutionary in our time was Strauss!”
Schoenberg, Arnold. 1975, in Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg. Edited by Leonard Stein, with translations by Leo Black. p. 137
after 1930
Arnold Schoenberg, (1946); as quoted in A Schoenberg reader - Documents of a life, edited by Joseph Auner, Yale University Press 2003, page 316-17
1940s
In a letter to Wassily Kandinsky, 18 Dec. 1911; as quoted in Schönberg and Kandinsky: An Historic Encounter, by Klaus Kropfinger; edited by Konrad Boehmer; published by Routledge (imprint of Taylor & Francis, an Informa Group company), 2003, p. 15-16 note 49
1910s
“I am delighted to add another unplayable work to the repertoire.”
On his Violin Concerto (Op. 36), as quoted in Schoenberg (1971) by Merle Armitage, p. 149
Undated
Note of 1944; as quoted in the Charles Ives profile at Decca Classics http://www.deccaclassics.com/music/composers/ives.html
1940s
quote from Glosses on the Theories of Others (1929); also in Style and Idea (1985), p. 313-314
1920s
"An Artistic Impression" (1909) in Style and Idea (1985), p. 189
1900s
"Hauer's Theories" (Notes of November 1923), in Style and Idea (1985), p. 210
1920s
"An Artistic Impression" (1909) in Style and Idea (1985), p. 190
before 1930
“I see the work as a whole first. Then I compose the details.”
As quoted in an interview with José Rodriguez (c. 1936) in Schoenberg (1971) by Merle Armitage, p. 149
after 1930
Context: I see the work as a whole first. Then I compose the details. In working out, I always lose something. This cannot be avoided. There is always some loss when we materialize. But there is compensating gain in vitality.
As quoted in an interview with José Rodriguez (c. 1936) in Schoenberg (1971) by Merle Armitage, p. 143
1930s
"About Music Criticism" (1909), in Style and Idea (1985), p. 196
1900s
“My works are 12-tone compositions, not 12-tone compositions”
Stuckenschmidt, Hans Heinz. 1977, in Schoenberg: His Life, World and Work; translated from the German by Humphrey Searle. p. 349.
after 1930
“My music is not modern, it is merely badly played”
Genette, Gérard. 1997. Immanence and Transcendence, translated by G. M. Goshgarian. p. 102
Undated
“Hauer looks for laws. Good. But he looks for them where he will not find them.”
"Hauer's Theories" (Notes of 9 May 1923), in Style and Idea (1985), p. 209
1920s
“There are no more geniuses, only critics.”
"Those Who Complain about the Decline" (1923), in Style and Idea (1985), p. 203
1920s
“I have never seen faces, but because I have looked people in the eye, only their gazes.”
As quoted in "The Red Gaze"' in Expressionism (2004) by Norbert Wolf, p. 92
Undated
Arnold Schoenberg, in a letter to Alma Mahler, 1914 (after the outbreak of the First World War); as quoted in "Impressions of War" http://www.gramophone.co.uk/feature/impressions-of-war by Philip Clark, The Gramophone, 4 August 2014
Schoenberg's quote regarding: 'the bourgeois tendencies of musical reactionaries such as Stravinsky and Maurice Ravel'
1910s
Quoted by Theodor Adorno in his essay "Art and the Arts", 1966, reproduced in Clausen 2008, 387 http://books.google.com/books?id=JaVBgTmaSgYC&lpg=PA387).
Undated
