Arnold+Schoenberg

__**Background Information on Arnold Schoenberg**__ Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) was from Austria and began painting and composing at a young age. He is famous for his contributions to the expressionist period and movements within Germany based on poetry and art. Before moving to America in 1934, Schoenberg created the Second Viennese school. He had a major influence on the music produced in the 20th century regarding his abnormal take towards harmony and development. His music started in the early 1900's to roughly the 1950's. He is now best known for breaking with tonality and creating serial composition.

//**__Music Videos__**// media type="custom" key="25217638" Analysis of Verklarte Nacht, Op.4 In 1899 this piece was composed. It is one of Schoenberg's earliest pieces and it obtains its stylistic lineage from German late Romanticism. It is a string sextet (uses 6 string instruments or a group of 6 musicians playing string instruments). In this case the piece uses 2 violins, 2 cellos and 2 violas. Even though his earlier published work was written for vocalists the composer had by then made alot of other music, these pieces generally incorporated strings. In fact, Schoenberg had studied both cello and violin for a number of years and was therefore well equipped to meet the compositional obstacles entailed in this piece above, //Verklarte Nacht.// The piece was a great success, particularly in Europe and it remains one of Schoenberg's most famous works.

__More specific Analysis__
//__Instrumentation__// Viola x2 Cello x2 Violin x2 No vocals

- D Major - Begins with cello in piano - low pitch notes - notes being played softly - The dynamics of the piece begin soft and gradually get louder creating mood - The violins are then introduced over the cello and harmonise adding to the texture of the piece. - The violas are then added producing large scale harmonic procedures - This piece lies largely outside of the sonata tradition - Moves away from the tonal centre changing to D minor in various areas. - Polytonal - Overall very powerful piece in which Schoenberg uses techniques (mainly pitch and dynamics) to create this tone.

media type="custom" key="25217650"

__Analysis of Pierrot Lunaire__ This piece is a melodrama by Arnold Schoenberg. It uses 21 poems and was premiered in Berlin on October 16,1912 with vocals by Albertine Zehme. The narrator conveys the stanzas in a Sprechstimme theme or style. This piece is atonal but doesnt at anytime use the twelve tone technique Schoenberg previously used in his majorly influential pieces. Sprechgesang and Sprechstimme are both musical terms derived from the German language meaning the vocal technique between singing and speaking. The mezzo soprano uses this technique in this piece.

__Instrumentation__ - Vocalist (usually a soprano singer) - Clarinet - Cello - Piano - Violin - Flute - Piccolo - Base Clarinet

- Piece starts with the piano playing a repeated pattern softly - The vocalist is then introduced singing the first stanza - Flute then comes into the piece to provide texture to the music - The dynamics in the piece change rapidly throughout

Definition of Serialism taken from Wikipedia: In music, **serialism** is a method or technique of composition that uses a series of values to manipulate different musical elements. Serialism began primarily with Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, though his contemporaries were also working to establish serialism as one example of post-tonal thinking. Twelve-tone technique orders the 12 notes of the chromatic scale, forming a row or series and providing a unifying basis for a composition's melody, harmony, structural progressions, and variations.
 * Serialism**

For more information please visit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serialism

__**Characteristics of Arnold Schoenberg's works.**__ Schoenberg's music can be divided into three areas. - First Period = Late romanticism - Second Period = Free atonality - Third Period = Twelve tone and tonal works

Schoenberg began his career as a musician with songs and string quartets written around the turn of the century. He had two collegues, Brahms (a German composer and pianist) and Wagner (a German composer, theatre director, polemicist and conductor), which both influenced his music greatly. In this time period Schoenberg's music included balanced phrases and an undisturbed hierarchy of key relationships. His pieces also showed bold and obvious Chromaticism. Chromaticism is a compositional technique which basically intersperses the primary diatonic pitches and chords with other pitches of the chromatic scale. This technique was shown a lot through this period of Schoenberg's music. All of the above approaches to a compositional piece reach an apex in Schoenberg's //Verklarte Nacht// (I have included an analysis of this piece in this document), a string sextet piece which develops many obvious "leitmotif" like themes (short, constantly recurring musical phrases).
 * Late Romanticism**

Arnold Schoenberg's music (from 1908 and forward) experiments with excluding traditional keys or tonal centres. Some of his works in this period had no key signature at all and since the composure of this piece the musician rarely used diatonic harmonies ever again. //Pierrot Lunaire// (another piece i will be analysing in this document) and many other well known pieces were made in this era, many were remarkable for their tonal development of whole-tone and quartal harmony. In this era Schoenberg began to play with dynamic and abnormal relationships within the ensemble, including dramatic pauses and unpredictable devotion within the instrumentation.
 * Free Atonality**

In the beginning of the 1920's Arnold Schoenberg's work began to create a particular order which would let his audience to listen to a simpler and clearer piece. He approached this using the method of composing with twelve tones which are related only with one another in which the twelve pitched of the octave (unrealised compositionally) are recognised as equal and notes would exaggerated or emphasised equally. Through this method Schoenberg thought of himself as a genius and considered his discovery to be the equivalent in music compared to the discoveries of Albert Einstein's in physics. Some pieces that were produced by Schoenberg in this period include; //Variations for Orchestra, Piano Pieces// and the //Piano Concerto.// There are some recurring characteristics in the pieces composed in this period. Some of these include: hexachordal levels, harmony, meter, partitioning, aggregates, linear set and multidimensional set presentations to name a few.
 * Twelve Tone and Tonal Works**

Arnold Schoenberg had very few contemporaries. Josef Matthias Hauer was one of Schoenberg's major contemporaries. He and Schoenberg had a tremendous conflict as Hauer claimed that he had invented the technique of Serialism. In fact Schoenberg and his two pupils Berg and Webern were majorly the catalyst for advancing this compositional technique.
 * Arnold Schoenberg's Contemporaries**

__**Bibliography:**__

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-pVz2LTakM - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verklärte_Nacht - http://library.thinkquest.org/27927/20th%20century_Arnold%20Schoenberg.htm -
 * -** http://www.classical.net/music/comp.lst/schoenberg.php
 * -** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Schoenberg
 * -** http://imslp.org/wiki/Pierrot_Lunaire,_Op.21_(Schoenberg,_Arnold)
 * - **https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=KsIATAaR-X0