Arnold Schoenberg

Overview

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.

Arnold Schönberg was born in Austria and taught in Germany before voluntarily 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.

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.

1440 Findings

Hours of research by our editors, distilled into minutes of clarity.

You've reached the end

Explore Society & Culture

Take a deep dive into the topics shaping our shared norms, values, and institutions. Art, music, and sports. Literature, architecture, and TV. Film, food, and philosophy. If it defines who we are as a society or how we express ourselves as a culture, then we're exploring it here.

View All Society & Culture