The UGLY Music of Arnold Schoenberg

Comments · 355

• ST

  @StanleyGrill · 1 year ago

  While Schoenberg is far from one my favorite composers, this video presented (at least in my view) a very limited overview of his music, focusing on what people who have listened little to his works and only heard about the dreaded 12 tone music. His music is so much more than that - and while perhaps some may find his music "ugly" there are many pieces that are anything but. His music often achieves a great emotional expressionism (equivalent perhaps to expressionism in painting) and while avoiding the tugs and pulls of tonal music, he very creatively used other means of expression - fascinating rhythmic interplay, extraordinary timbral colors (he was a master orchestrator), intervallic development creating wonderful contrapuntal interplay of voices, etc. I think his overall lifetime achievements deserve better than this very limited, one-sided overview. And there are certainly many other great composers who used dissonance regularly in their music (for example, Ives, Bartok, Stravinsky) who somehow don't get so vociferously attacked as does Schoenberg.

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• AR

  @arcajour-i2r · 1 year ago

  Schoenberg is a composer whose music I simply cannot live without, especially the late romantic work, the Second String Quartet, the Five Pieces for Orchestra, and the later Piano Concerto. But really, I love all of his music, and that of his students Webern and Berg, not to mention his mentor Zemlinsky.

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• EN

  @EnriqueSanchez2001 · 1 year ago

  Good, concise overview.  Your direct natural style is thankfully not adored with cheap side-quips, but goes into the subject matter with ease.  I treasure his "STRUCTURAL FUNCTIONS of HARMONY"! ♥

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• XE

  @xenocrates2559 · 1 year ago

  I think you raise good points.  The situation of 12-tone music has changed in recent decades.  I don't know of any composers that think of themselves as 12-tone composers these days, but I have noticed that some composers will use a row, and its transformations, as a technique here and there.  It's kind of like they have absorbed the row and now consider it one possible tool rather than a defining commitment.  You can transform a tonal melody into a row, for example, to shift the mood; or vice versa.  I suspect that is where these 'revolutionary' techniques will land, as something a composer can use here and there, now and then.

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• NI

  @nidrosia · 1 year ago

  Prof. Johannes Menke of Basel wrote an article in which he reduces the Tristan prelude to a single bass line with figured bass. This illustrates that Wagner was part of the long line of composers who learned their craft by studying figured bass and partimento-like exercises. On the other hand, Schoenberg's twelve-tone music coincides with a historical transition when the theory of composition began to move away from these traditional principles. Schoenberg's atonal music is not related to the basso continuo theory. In this sense, the term "revolutionary" is apt.

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• AR

  @argonburilovitch2351 · 11 months ago

  Variations for Orchestra, after all these years still one of my all-time favourite orchestral variation sets, right up there with Reger's Mozart and Elgar's Enigma variations...  now going to bed after taking a good sip from my "Schönberg hater's tears" cup.

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• TH

  @thomasvendetti3742 · 1 year ago

  Some Schoenberg’s music is very interesting to me. His Variations for Orchestra fascinates! I find it odd that we can feel comfortable with visual abstraction and not auditory. I never avoid galleries that display abstract art. In fact it is often quite satisfying! I wonder why we have such difficulty in the auditory domain. I like to point out that we may view a tree on a calm day as quite beautiful. And we can view the same tree on an extremely windy day, filled with wild motion and color all blurred together as also quite beautiful. Peculiar, isn’t it?

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• AN

  @anthonycook6213 · 1 year ago (edited)

  Schoenberg did not develop his technique to eliminate tonality. He was an explorer of the limit of triadic harmony, at the point where tonal direction becomes lost in ambiguity, and the new kind of artistic expression that it could be applied to. He was a master of tonal harmony, and required that his students also master harmony first before studying his work. He continued to write music that reaches tonal resolution in works throughout his life. Yes, the new expression is otherworldly, but it is not meant to displace tonality, it is just a new set of tools for one region of expression. He felt his contribution to art was to understand atonality and explore it without compromise and at the expense of his popularity. 12-tone serial composition provided the tools that made, for instance, the score of the original "Planet of the Apes" possible--and no one complained about that score of Jerry Goldsmith being "ugly." Moses und Aron, A Survivor from Warsaw, Variations for Orchestra, the Piano and Violin Concerti to me are beautiful, uniquely expressive of serious and dark subjects. His achievement did not mean that academic professors should teach that harmony has "evolved" out of existence, nor that Alma Deutscher was wrong t for having written "Cinderella," but he had different things to express. It is just one more compositional technique that composers may find useful. Strange and eerie, yes--but in its own way beautiful, not ugly. But it also does not mean that Erich Korngold might not eventually be seen as the favorite composer of the 20th century!

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• SY

  @synthifou5815 · 11 months ago

  Tonal or atonal, beautiful or ugly, natural or unnatural, music for the heart or music for the head... So many outdated questions (if they were ever relevant) that I&apos;m amazed people still ask in 2025. Schoenberg&apos;s detractors end up being so focused on the theoretical reflections behind his works that they forget to ask the only question that matters : does this music have expressive content ? And whether we like them or not, with Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, most of the time the answer is yes.<br><br>Your video is a little more nuanced than the title suggested. But because of it, many people in the comments seem to allow themselves to share their hazy theories and their simplistic vision of the history of music. The demiurge doesn&apos;t exist ; an individual doesn&apos;t have the power to change the course of history. Every artist is caught in a context, and, at the beginning of the 20th century, tonality appeared for many composers (Debussy, Decaux, Scriabin, Langgaard, Hauer, Ives...) as what it has always been : a historical contingency.

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• YV

  @yvesjeaurond4937 · 11 months ago

  <i>Verklärte Nacht</i> (the transfigured night) is a delightful piece inspired from a touching poem about a woman confessing she is pregnant to her fiancé, and that he isn&apos;t the father. Magnanimous, the fiance says I love you so much that I&apos;ll raise the child as my own.<br>You didn&apos;t mention Glenn Gould&apos;s enthusiasm for Schoenberg? A tone row esthetic can be reduced to a technique. A few &quot; rows&quot; can be found even in Bach. You are right that as an esthetic, even promoted by the likes of Pierre Boulez, it is a bit of a dead end. Bebop and free jazz explore rows too. For most people, it&apos;s just too much. :-) Cheers from Ottawa Ontario Canada.

• TH

  @thomask1424 · 11 months ago

  The problem with Schoenberg&apos;s later works (starting with the 2nd quartet) is that one must really <b>listen</b> to it. Easy enough to dismiss it as &quot;noise&quot; on a single hearing but repeated listening brings familiarity. When you learn to listen to the individual lines - repeated rhythmic and melodic cells that fit together like a mosaic - it all starts to make sense.

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• TO

  @TomD67 · 11 months ago

  Schoenberg has been quoted as saying &quot;My music isn&apos;t really &apos;modern,&apos; it&apos;s just badly played.&quot; For some really beautiful recordings of Schoenberg&apos;s music, go to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3dPdZ-oNXs">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3dPdZ-oNXs</a> and listen to some performers Schoenberg admired.

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