Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) was born in Vienna on September 13, 1874. His family was not wealthy and for the most part he taught himself music. As a young adult, he worked as a bank clerk during the day and studied music at night. He realized that music was his true passion and when he was twenty-one he quit his job at the bank and began conducting, teaching, and composing music for a living.
Schoenberg’s early compositions are typical of the late romantic style and are strongly influenced by the music of Richard Wagner. His style included strong dissonant harmonies and was very chromatic — it included all possible notes. He eventually formed an atonal approach to composing. In atonal music there is no tonal center and no gravitational pull to any one particular tone.
Later, Schoenberg created a system of atonal composition called serial music. Serial, or twelve-tone composition uses all twelve notes of the chromatic scale in a specific order. The order of notes is fixed and is called a twelve-tone row. The row may be played forward, backward, upside down, or backward and upside down at the same time.
The result of Schoenberg’s efforts was a very intensely emotional style called expressionism. Like expressionist art it strove to reveal the deepest psychological feelings within the artist. The mood of some of these works can be seen in the famous painting by Edvard Munch, The Scream (1893). In fact, Schoenberg was himself an accomplished painter and he exhibited some of his works with other expressionists. His music and art reflect not only the inner torment of individuals but also the political and social tension in Europe before World War I.
Schoenberg spent most of his career in Vienna but was forced to leave due to Hitler’s Nazi regime. He foresaw the coming violence in the early 1930s and like Igor Stravinsky, he fled to the United States and made Hollywood his home. In 1936 he was appointed professor of music at the University of California at Los Angeles.