Arnold Schoenberg was an Austrian-

American composer, music theorist,

teacher, writer, and painter. He is
widely considered one of the most
influential composers of the 20th
century. He was associated with the
expressionist movement in German
poetry and art.
12 NOTE COMPOSITION The technique
is a means of ensuring that all 12 notes
of the chromatic scale are sounded as
often as one another in a piece of music
while preventing the emphasis of any
one note through the use of tone rows,
orderings of the 12 pitch classes. All 12
notes are thus given more or less equal
importance, and the music avoids being
in a key. Over time, the technique
increased greatly in popularity and
eventually became widely influential on
20th-century composers.

Arnold Schoenberg gained fame as a

musical innovator and pioneer of
modernism in 20th-century Western
music, with his highly chromatic and
densely structured tonal pieces, his
intensely expressive atonal scores, and
his twelve-tone compositions.

What is the chromatic scale? The

chromatic scale is all twelve notes of
the musical alphabet arranged one after
the other in a stepwise scale. Each
degree of the scale is separated by a
half-step interval so that the chromatic
scale covers both the white and black
keys of the keyboard.

Expressionism is a term applied to an

artistic style that depicts the
expression of individual subjective
experience, as opposed to objective
reality. Expressionist artists use their
art to convey feelings and emotion
rather than physical reality. These
feelings can be derived from nature,
society, or aesthetics.
Expressionism in music is a term for
composition and performance that
emphasizes the expression of strong
feelings. Though expressionism was
first defined as an artistic movement, it
has since been applied to other
branches of the arts. The word
expressionist is sometimes used as a
synonym for “modern artist” or
composer.
How would you define 12-tone
composition?
The twelve-tone technique is a style of
musical composition that organizes all
twelve notes of the chromatic scale
into a series called a tone row.

Although it included various artists and

styles, Expressionism first emerged in
1905, when a group of four German
architecture students who desired to
become painters - Ernst Ludwig
Kirchner, Fritz Bleyl, Karl Schmidt-
Rottluff, and Erich Heckel - formed the
group Die Brücke (The Bridge) in the
city of Dresden.