Music of Arnold Schönberg

As a pioneer of new music you have to call Arnold Schönberg in first place. His early work , the string sextette "Verklärte Nacht" and the "Gurrelieder", written for choir and orchestra, are totally under the influence of late Romantic period. 1909 Schönberg created a new way. Consciously, he did not work with the traditional tonality any longer, his lines of melody mix up totally independent and without consideration to the harmonic rules.

1917 Schönberg found a new kind of composition, which was able to replace the functions of tonality. A row of 12 notes, made up of intervals from the chromatic scale, results the building material for his works. With this way of working, he reached a great success. With this innovation Schönberg triggered off a revolution in music.

Some important compositions of Schönberg:

• The chamber symphony, opus 9, 1906, is written for 15 solo instruments (10 wind instruments and 5 strings). This is a expanded chamber music, an extreme countermovement to the giant scores of Mahler and Strauss. The chamber symphony is transitional work. The striving of Schönberg for a new kind of expression is shown here for the first time.

• In the 5 pieces for orchestra, opus16, premiere in London in 1912, Schönberg works in a new way. He wrote expressionism music without any tonality. At that time, this music was new and hard to understand. To make it easier for the listener, Schönberg gives every piece of music a subtitle as a hint to it’s meaning.

• The 6 little pieces for piano were build up in two phases. The first five at one day (the 19th of Feb. 1911), the last one on the 17th of June. The idea of creating a miniature was at that time as strong in Schönberg as in his pupils Alban Berg or Anton Webern

Schönberg worked at the musical content, not at the elegance of the piano playing.

The major interval of the compositions is (melodic and harmonic) the third. As the basic component of the accords it listens like a cadence. What’s more, the pauses and the escape of rushed activities towards the end also gives you the feeling of a cadence.