Informationen zu "Arnold Schoenberg biography (en)"
Komponist/Autor: Bojan Bujic
Verlag: Phaidon Verlag
Verlagsnummer: 9780714846149
EAN: 9780714846149
ISBN: 978-0-7148-4614-9
Beschreibung
Arnold Schönberg
In this book, Bojan Bujic sets into an appropriate cultural context the
immensely rich life of a composer who is, arguably, the key musical
personality of the twentieth century. A major force in the development of
modern music, Arnold Schoenberg (1874û1951) is famous for abandoning tonality
and introducing the 12-tone 'serial' method of composition. There can be no
agreement as to whether Schoenberg is the greatest composer of his time,
especially as his innovative musical language did not appeal to all who came
after him, but directly or indirectly, he affected so many musicians and
listeners of his own and of subsequent generations that his centrality cannot
be disputed. In addition to his work as a composer, Schoenberg was an
important theorist of tonal music and an enormously influential teacher, with
Anton Webern and Alban Berg among his most famous pupils.
Brought up in the rich and cosmopolitan cultural life of Vienna, Schoenberg
started to play the violin at the age of nine and began experimenting with
composition almost immediately, but his education was cut short by the death
of his father in 1889. Schoenberg had no formal training in music until he
was in his late teens, and throughout his life he remained proud of the fact
that so much of what he had absorbed as a youth about music and literature
derived from his own tenacity and sense of purpose. Schoenberg first composed
in the late Romantic tradition, and his earliest acknowledged works,
including the string sextet 'Verklärte Nacht', date from the turn of the
century. Following a brief interlude in Berlin, where he worked as a cabaret
musician and teacher and also wrote the symponic poem 'Pelleas und
Melisande', he returned to Vienna. Here, he began taking on pupils such as
Webern and Berg, and further developed his musical style, in due course
causing a sensation with the dissonance of his 'serial' technique and the
greater harmonic strangeness and complexity of his material. Schoenberg only
returned to something approaching his tonal style decades later, with his
'Suite in G' for strings.
In 1925, a couple of years after having turned down an offer to become
director of the Bauhaus music school because he had been informed of
antisemitic tendencies at the institution, Schoenberg moved back to Berlin to
take up a post as director of a master class in composition at the Arts
Academy, in spite of antisemitic protests appearing in the Zeitschrift für
Musik in reaction to his professorship. Later, when he situation of Jews in
Germany became clear to him, Schoenberg increasingly spent time away from
Berlin, and finally decided to move to the US in 1933, where he taught in
Boston and New York at the Malkin Conservatory. In 1934, Schoenberg moved to
Los Angeles, taking up a teaching post at USC and a professorship at UCLA. He
lived in Los Angeles, where John Cage became one of his pupils and George
Gershwin a good friend, until his death in 1951.
There are those who contend that Schoenberg's uncompromising search for an
individual voice led him to create music which is too difficult to follow,
since many familiar features, which normally enable listeners to find their
way through a piece of music, have been removed or radically re-shaped. This
is often perceived as the main cause of the isolation of avant-garde music in
the late twentieth century, but Bujic argues that these accusations are
frequently made before Schoenberg's music has even had a chance to present
itself - its difficulty and strangeness are uncritically evoked, often
preventing the music from being appreciated in its own right. In this book,
Bujic sets out to win more listeners to Schoenberg's music, by introducing
his life, work and theories in an accessible, sympathetic manner.
