Happy Birthday to Arnold Schoenberg, the Greatest Musical Genius of the 20th Century

VISIONARY GENIUS: CELEBRATING ARNOLD SCHOENBERG AND HIS EXTRAORDINARY AND BRILLIANT “FIVE PIECES FOR ORCHESTRA”

Today, we celebrate the birthday of Arnold Schoenberg, one of the most brilliant composers and visionary geniuses in music history. Born in Vienna, Schoenberg fundamentally transformed the landscape of classical music by breaking away from traditional tonality and paving the way for the modern era.

To honor his lasting legacy, we are featuring the brilliant and extraordinary first movement of his Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16. Composed in 1909, this masterpiece captures Schoenberg during his thrilling “atonal” period — just before he developed his famous twelve-tone technique. Incidentally, it aligns beautifully with Wassily Kandinsky’s major transition into abstraction. The two geniuses shared a remarkably parallel artistic evolution, moving closely from late-Romanticism/figuration, to atonality/pure abstraction, and eventually toward highly structured serialism/geometric art. They were also great friends until their tragic falling out over political and personal tensions in the 1920s.

Portrait of Arnold Schoenberg byEgon Schiele.

While many everyday listeners have never heard Schoenberg’s name, they have almost certainly heard his genius. When he pioneered the “emancipation of the dissonance,” he laid the sonic groundwork for modern film scoring. Generations of Hollywood composers — from the creators of classic psychological thrillers and horror films to modern masters of cinematic suspense — have borrowed his radical techniques. Whenever a movie score uses fragmented, keyless orchestration to make your skin crawl or build an atmosphere of pure dread, you are listening to Schoenberg’s DNA. As a result, many people view his compositions as “scary movie music” (an attribute given to almost all music which is non-tonal, which all composers, myself included, have fallen victim to.) Sadly, most people fail to view Schoenberg’s music within the conext of high art, and squarely within the lineage of Bach, Brahms, and Mahler. Moreover, few recognize how extraordinarily beautiful the music truly is. Schoenberg was one of the most dedicated composition teachers (if not the most dedicated) in the entire history of western classical music, to the degree that he would painstakingly teach every student according to his or her own level within a class of music students. It’s one thing to do so within individual lessons, but in a classroom setting, it’s unheard of! He would even go so far as to create individual tests for each student within his classes according to his or level! (This is utterly unheard of in any field or classroom, let alone music theory or composition.) His accomplishments as a composition teacher can be viewed by the sheer number of extraordinarly accomplished composition students he produced, more than any other composer and composition teacher in music history — amongst them, none other than Alban Berg and Anton Webern, just to name a couple. Amazingly, although he may be associated with the sonorities of “scary movie music” and had many hollywood composers approach him to learn his “tricks” with respect to writing this style of music, he NEVER taught contemporary composition or music! He exclusively taught traditional harmony and counterpoint, using the greats — Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms — as his examples and benchmarks, and left his composition students to their own devices to figure out how to write “contemporary music” with their own voice and skills.

Arnold Schoenberg’s musical genius, and this specific piece of music (Op. 16) stand as THE definitive milestone in early 20th-century music, marking the exact moment classical structure shifted into an extraordinary, bold new territory that no-one could have imagined before Schoenberg. It remains a powerful introduction to the fearless creativity of a composer who reshaped musical history forever, and whose accomplishments go sadly unsung by the vast majority of musicians today.