Youth
Schoenberg placed an announcement seeking pupils in the Neue musikalische Presse. Between 1918 and 1920, Schönberg taught over 100 pupils at Schwarzwald schools, established and led by the educational reformer Eugenie Schwarzwald.
Throughout his life, his students included Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Hanns Eisler, Egon Wellesz, John Cage, Lou Harrison, Earl Kim, Leon Kirchner, and other prominent musicians.
List of schools where he worked:
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Schwarzwald School for Girls
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Academy of Music and Fine Arts, Stern Conservatory in Berlin
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Prussian Academy of the Arts in Berlin
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Malkin Conservatory in Boston,
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USC
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UCLA
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U Chicago
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Other music Festivals and seminars
He furiously declared:
“I had not begun to reach the age of retirement! Maybe some teachers have nothing to give after a certain age, but I am still full!”
“Take for example Erwartung. You will find in that score a great number of forte nuances when, without octave doublings, only a portion of the orchestra is being employed.
You will recall that for more than twenty years I have been advising my pupils always to consider, whenever they are analyzing a passage marked forte, whether they could conceive it sounding better if marked piano.”
ARNOLD SCHÖNBERG:
INTERVIEW WITH MYSELF
“Schoenberg teaches one to think”
Erwin Stein
“With American music Schönberg has had little chance for acquaintance, although a few Americans have studied with him abroad. He is sure, however, that it will be possible to develop widespread and significant musical talent in this country. Among foreign composers he expressed admiration for Hindemith, Milhaud, Stravinsky, Ravel and Bartók. Among his noted European pupils, Alban Berg of “Wozzeck” is working on his second opera, “Lulu,” based on plays of Wedekind; von Webern is composing chamber music and is also engaged on a piano-concerto.”
THE HERALD TRIBUNE
Thinking
“I don’t want to be understood; I want to express myself--but I hope I will be misunderstood. It would be terrible of me if I were transparent to people”
9 Oct. 1910 to Alma Mahler
“The musical idea and the logic, technique and art of its presentation”
Incomplete phrase from Musical Idea book
Laws of Comprehensibility
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One understands only what one can take note of.
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One can easily take note of something only if it is
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Clear (characteristic, plastic, sharply contoured and articulated)
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Frequently repeated
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Not too long
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Any digression makes comprehensibility harder
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Any digression that rapidly and convincingly demonstrates its kinship with the main point makes comprehensibility easier
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The unarticulated is harder to comprehend than the articulated; articulation makes for character
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Over-elaborate articulation leads to confusion
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Segments that are different should look different; but what is identical must be strikingly identical
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Widely-ranging development is digression, which makes comprehensibility harder
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Depth of development must not destroy the smoothness of the surface
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The quicker the tempo of the tones and rhythms, the slower must be that of the figures, and their development, i.e. the tempo at which the ideas is presented.
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The greater the distinctions between the individual figures, the motivic transformations, themes, etc., and the more loosely such things are juxtaposed, the greater the difficulty in comprehending the way in which things are being expressed.
The method of composing with twelve tones
grew out of a necessity.
EMANCIPATION OF THE DISSONANCE
TREAT DISSONANCE LIKE CONSONANCES
Compositions with Twelve Tones (1941)
LEARNING BY MAKING,
MAKING TO SHOW LEARNING
Color-coordinated, saddle stitch binding!
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“The evaluation of tone color, the second dimension of tone, is in a much less cultivated, much less organized state than is the aesthetic evaluation of [pitch]. Nevertheless, we go right on boldly connecting sounds with one another, contrasting them with one another, simply by feeling; [...] Now, if it is possible to create patterns out [of] pitch[es], patterns we call “melodies,” [...] then it must also be possible to make progressions out of … “tone color,” progressions whose relations with one another work with a kind of logic entirely equivalent to that logic which satisfies us in the melody of pitches.”
Style and Idea, 1911
