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Who Is Arnold Schoenberg's Life Or False Music?

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Arash Hajihosseini
European history
Peyman farzinpour

Arnold Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg was born on 13th September 1874 in Vienna. He started taking violin lessons at the age of 8. One year later he started composing music. He also took some counterpoint lessons but for the most part he was self-thought. He lost his father at the age of 15 so he had to provide for his family. He left school and got a job at a bank. At that time Vienna’s infrastructure was modernizing. Vienna became an industrial city and cultural life improved. Schoenberg could not afford the cultural venues because he was poor. He went to concerts and stood behind the fence so he could hear the music for free. Later he left the bank and started conducting and orchestrating …show more content…

When you play a note you can only play it again once you played all the other 11 notes. This is called a tone row. For Example, In opus 23 all 12 tone are presented in this order: C#, A, B, G, Ab, F#, Bb, D, E, Eb, C, F as you can see no note repeats until all the other 11 notes are played. The tone rows in a way function as scales in tonal music. The first time that he tried using all the notes in the chromatic scale was in Piano opus 9. In that piece we can still hear a little bit tonality though. It starts with a melody that outlines a b major triad but accompaniment makes causes the whole thing to sound ambiguous. Using tone rows is not the only rule in 12 tone music. There are other rules in this type of music as well. For example, the notes that are in top and bottom voices have to be shorter in duration. This is a very important rule because it helping keeping every notes importance the same. Otherwise the outer sound more important than the others because their placement. These rules aren’t rigid. In fact Schoenberg broke them often and he suggest you should break them as well if necessary. In The Unanswered Question 5 Leonard Bernstein says” There is no such a thing as atonal. Schoenberg used the same 12 notes that Bach used. He just destroyed the hierarchy. Schoenberg even denied the possibility of atonality. The 12 tones of the chromatic scale have a tonal relationship to each other. If true atonality is to be achieved some uniquely different basis for it is needed. Maybe a different division of the octave.” In the 12 tone system you can take one row and use some of it’s notes as melody and others as chords. Some of the phrases in 12-tone music spell out certain chords but because it is following the tone row principles it sounds ambiguous and atonal. We see this kind of harmonic implication happening with augmented triads in opus 23. Also Opus 30 starts with a repeated 4 bar phrases that

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