Arnold Schoenberg

Born in Vienna in 1874, Arnold Schoenberg was one of the most influential 20th-century composers. He is considered to be the architect of 12-tone music, a system designed to guarantee equal distribution of each note in the chromatic scale. His early work, however, embraced German Romanticism, under which he wrote his ubiquitous sextet Verklärte Nacht in 1899. Beginning with his String Quartet No. 2 in 1908, he broke with traditional tonality, following it with his 1912 classic Pierrot lunaire, an expressionist song cycle using flute, clarinet, violin, cello, speaker and piano that eventually became a standard chamber ensemble format. By the early 1920s, he had fully embraced serialism, advancing the 12-tone ideas of Josef Matthias Hauer and establishing the technique as the dominant focus of the Second Viennese School, which also included Alban Berg and Anton Webern. In 1926, he began teaching at the Prussian Academy of the Arts in Berlin, where he continued to write 12-tone pieces as well as those using conventional tonality. The rise of Nazism led Schoenberg to move to the US in 1933, where he taught at USC and UCLA and continued to compose until the late 1940s. He died in 1951, aged 76.