Twentieth Century Music’s First Response to Modernity:
The Second Viennese School

By Ben Barasch

Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg c. 1920

Whether one calls oneself conservative or revolutionary, whether one composes in a conventional or progressive manner, whether one tries to imitate old styles or is destined to express new ideas – whether one is a good composer or not – one must be convinced of the infallibility of one’s own fantasy and one must believe in one’s own inspiration.
-Arnold Schoenberg

At the end of the nineteenth century, the ever-expanding language of TONALITY swelled to its breaking point. WAGNER and BRAHMS, the musical gods of late Romanticism, were dead, dividing the European musical world into two camps that were considered opposite in every aspect of life and thought. Wagner was the supposed PROGRESSIVE, the innovator; Brahms the old-fashioned CLASSICIST. GERMAN AND AUSTRIAN MUSIC COMPOSED FROM 1890 TO 1905 that attempted to expand on Brahms or Wagner utilized dense, ultra-CHROMATIC harmony. What was to come next?

From the decaying remains of late Romanticism came ARNOLD SCHOENBERG. Though his formative years were spent in the midst of a musical world divided by the legacies of Brahms and Wagner, he never gravitated to either side. Despite being strongly influenced by both masters, in 1908 he was the first composer to use ATONALITY, which he called “an emancipation of the dissonance,” and he later invented TWELVE-TONE COMPOSITION, an organized system not based on traditional harmony (tonality). These were radical steps toward freeing music from the rules of a system that Schoenberg believed could no longer express the inner life of modern man.

Schoenberg’s greatest students were ALBAN BERG and ANTON WEBERN, whom he taught between 1904 and 1910. Collectively the three were known as the SECOND VIENNESE SCHOOL. They developed atonal EXPRESSIONISM before the First World War, and during the early 1920’s, SERIALISM based on Schoenberg’s Twelve-Tone model. Serialism went on to become the most important and influential musical style of the Twentieth Century, reaching its climax in the early 1950’s when composers such as Boulez, Stockhausen and Berio worked with TOTAL SERIALISM. But soon thereafter it was abandoned, being next to unintelligible for most performers and audiences.

Serialism, and to a lesser extent Atonality, were classical music’s first true responses to MODERNITY. Serialism was born from the need to create a new system as legitimate, revered, relevant and timeless as that of traditional tonality. Time and history handed the challenge to Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. They failed at creating this timeless system due to several important reasons. Firstly, the system is artificial – it is not based on the acoustical laws of physics, and is thus strange and unnatural to our ears. Also, it requires a broad musical knowledge to understand and utilize with any degree of success. Most importantly, interest for even the most venerable classical music was waning in the early years of the century in favor of Jazz and other forms of popular music. Atonality and Serialism helped to divide an already flagging musical world; it may have assisted the decline of classical music in the twentieth century.

The inability of these new innovations to revitalize classical music is indicative of the marginalized position of serious art in the twentieth century. True art that faced the challenges of modernity could not succeed on the main stage of modern society.