Arnold Schoenberg was a 19th- and 20th-century composer, teacher, theorist, and painter who abandoned traditional musical ideas in favor of experimenting with sound and dissonance. He's best known for inventing the 12-tone technique, a radical idea that has influenced generations of musicians.
> Schoenberg's innovations expanded the confines of music. (Watch)
> In addition to musicians, film composers also followed in his footsteps. (Read)
Arnold Schönberg was born in Austria and taught in Germany before leaving the country in 1933 after the Nazis took power. He moved to Los Angeles and began using the more Americanized "Schoenberg." In the US, he embraced his Jewish heritage and, in 1947, wrote "A Survivor from Warsaw," in which a narrator recounts the horrors of the death camp over the composer's dissonant music.
> The instructions for "A Survivor from Warsaw" said "there should never be a pitch" in the narrator's voice. (Listen)
> Schoenberg invented a board game that mimicked geopolitics. (Read)
> He was close friends with painter Wassily Kandinsky, a pioneer of abstract painting. (Read)
Throughout his life, Schoenberg was associated with various avant-garde artistic movements, including romanticism, modernism, and expressionism. Although his music was sometimes poorly received by audiences during his lifetime, he's now widely considered the most influential classical composer of the 20th century.
> Fed up with difficult audiences, Schoenberg started a private concert club that prohibited audible reactions. (Read)
> Among his acolytes were jazz legend Ornette Coleman and avant-garde composer John Cage. (Watch)
Discover more:
> Browse a gallery of Schoenberg's paintings. (Explore)
> He designed a musical typewriter that transcribed complex compositions with a simple keyboard. (Read)
> Arnold Schoenberg was superstitious about the number 13 and died on Friday, July 13, 1951. (Read)
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