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This Experimentation And Examination Of Musical Dissonance Began An Age Of ...

This experimentation and examination of musical dissonance began an age of cultural investigation and philosophical enquiry into the significance of structure and abstraction within all of the arts.

Schoenberg's Structuralism

Arnold Schoenberg was born to an Ashkenazi to a Jewish family amidst the Leopoldstadt district in Vienna, Austria. His mother was a native of Prague and was a piano teacher, whilst his father was a native shopkeeper from the region of Bratislava. Schoenberg was a largely self-taught musician who only took minor lessons with the composer Alexander von Zemlinsky. In his twenties, he lived by orchestrating operettas, while composing works such as the string sextet Verklärte Nacht. He later made an orchestral version of this, which has come to be one of his most popular pieces. Both Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler recognised Schoenberg's significance as a composer and realised the significance of his direction. Whilst Strauss turned his attention to a more conservative approach to his own work, dismissing Schoenberg somewhat in the process, Mahler carried on with Schoenberg model and continued to support his line of enquiry. Subsequently, Schoenberg taught harmony, counterpoint and composition by using Heinrich Bellermann's treatise 'Counterpoint' as his text that would inform his own model.
After many years of practise, Schoenberg wrote his own theory called Harmonielehre or The Theory of Harmony, in the summer of 1910, which incorporated the notion of dissonance and consonance at its core. This theory went on to distinguish a new style of teaching and incorporating tonal change and scale as a rigid depiction of structural music. During his subsequent time spent composing, Schoenberg developed the most influential version of the dodecaphonic, 12 tone method of composition (Schoenberg, 1983). This technique was taken up by many of his students and was incorporated into mainstream music criticism and analysis. Through this method of engagement, analysis, and in particular translation of the particular methods of the great classical composers, especially Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms, Schoenberg taught a structure and method by which he believed music could be used and perfected.
The idea behind Schoenberg's theory was a commitment to the concept of an unshaken adherence to the idea of a structure itself that informs the meaning of the music's composition. Concepts such as the virtuous and unending quest for the pursuance of Truth were at the heart of perfecting structural knowledge. Stemming from a growing concern for the way in which music was developing through the works of Wagner, Strauss and Mahler, Schoenberg reinvigorated music with a sense of simplicity.

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