Following the rules of tonality and roaming within a vast prairie of melody was what traditional composers chose to do. Aggressively breaking rules and creating new types of sound was what modern composers chose to do. For an eaglet raised with a sense of security from its parents, when it looks at the sky, it has a dream—to cast off the shackles that restrain it and soar. Modernist composers were like rebellious eaglets, flying to the four winds and trying to make their own waves on the vast ocean.

In looking at the history of modern music, one cannot help but speak of three composers from the Second Viennese School: Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern. Schoenberg instructed the other two and was a core figure of the school, being the first to create a system for atonal music and establishing a foundation for the school in the areas of technique and style. He developed a new threshold for composition for avant-garde composers, expanding the boundaries of music indefinitely.

Writing Atonal Music

The Second Viennese School is famous for creating atonal music. It was first proposed by Schoenberg as being in opposition to tonal music. “Tonality” refers to the arrangement of pitch and chords. A tonal structure is formed by a primary-secondary relationship, stability and instability, and the tonic chord and tendency toward the tonic chord. Atonal music, on the other hand, breaks the most fundamental principle of tonality—the hierarchical relationship of tones. It views all of the twelve half-steps within an octave as completely equal and abandons the attraction and tendency in the progression as determined by the nature of the notes. The three abovementioned composers were part of the early phase of the free-atonality period and the middle and late phase of the twelve-note-system period.

The twelve-note system was a further development of atonal music. In 1921, Schoenberg refined Josef Hauer’s twelve-note method, and Webern applied the system in the strictest manner in composing his music. Compared with Berg’s, Webern’s music more stringently followed an ordered protocol of the system. The basic idea of the system is to use the twelve half tones of the chromatic scale to freely assemble a series, and there are four ways (transformations) in proceeding with this series: prime, inversion, retrograde, and retrograde-inversion. When any of these transformations is used, the following principle is to be followed: No note may be repeated before each of the twelve notes is sounded in a row. This keeps a certain note from becoming the focus, which can occur with repetition.

Integral serialism is a more comprehensive serialized form of composition in the twelve-tone system. In response to the restriction of how the twelve-tone system only controls pitch arrangement, composers who used integral serialism applied control by numerical proportions to all kinds of music elements. After WWII, French Pierre Boulez and Olivier Messiaen, German Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Italian Luigi Nono gradually expanded Webern’s twelve-note system, systematically ordering tempo, time values, dynamics, tone, speed, and even pedal use, forming integral serialism. Its influence spread from Europe to composers in the US, such as Milton Babbit, an icon of music at Princeton University, and his pupils.

Therefore, the twelve-note system and integral serialism are atonal. Since they are both based on the same concept of series, they are both viewed as forms of “serialism,” which thrived for decades in the West and influenced an entire generation of 20th-century composers. But as music became more diverse and the desire arose for a return to tonality in the middle and later years of the century, the influence of serialism began to gradually weaken.

Expressionism

The atonality of the Second Viennese School is clearly recognizable. It was strongly influenced by Expressionism, an art movement that thrived in the late 19^th century and early 20^th century. The music world usually views the atonality of the Second Viennese School as a resonation of Expressionism.

Expressionism differs from Impressionism in that even though both have abstract aspects, their psychological pursuits are in opposition. Impressionism pursues the beauty of obscurity, integrating subjective feelings into objective scenery to create an emotional sensation. Expressionism, on the other hand, emphasizes negative emotional experiences, such as madness, hysteria, fear, and anxiety. An icon of Expressionist painting was Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, whose The Scream is a display of the absurd through exaggeration and distortion in the imagery.

The features of Expressionist music are similar to those of painting. Once tonality was abandoned, Expressionist music was filled with the dissonant notes of chromaticism, emphasizing piercing sounds, extreme contrasts of register, disjointed and irregular tempos, and a fragmented use of source material. All of these features combine to produce a decadent, restless feeling.

Schoenberg preferred to express the above emotions through female performers. For example, in 1909, his single-act opera Erwartung was tailor-made for a single female role. It expresses the psychological development of the protagonist as she searches in a dreamlike state for her lover in a dark forest, experiencing all kinds of scary, bizarre delusions and finally nearing insanity upon discovering her lover by tripping over his corpse. Her hysteria and the extreme style of the music echo each other, establishing the direction for Expressionism in music.

Another of Schoenberg’s pieces, the 1912 chamber music-like song cycle Pierrot Lunaire, is based on 21 poems from Symbolist Albert Giraud’s 1883 cycle of poems by the same name. The lonely Pierrot is psychologically affected by the moon, so the piece is full of soprano arias, solemnly making the female protagonist the spokesperson for the composer’s absurd imagination. The soprano line, the intonation of the lyrics, and the notes being sung in sprechstimme (a form of performance between singing and speaking) produces a spooky effect that raises the hair on the back of your neck. A public performance that focused on the female role was a major innovation for those times. It was the first time in music history the female element was the focus of the piece, so it was a challenge for conservative audiences in both the mode of performance and sound experience.

What is undeniable is that Expressionist music could definitely better express the psychological states of people in extreme circumstances compared with music from previous centuries. Berg’s opera Wozzeck is like that too. It tells the story of an ordinary soldier who gave his all to his love and ended up killing her and himself due to her betrayal. Living during a time of war as a tragic hero representing the oppressed of common society, Wozzeck falls into despair and gradually goes insane. Berg also adopted the dark forest and fear from his mentor Schoenberg’s piece, but he did not use only the female role to create the sense of dementedness; the male lead also experiences emotional breakdown due to his lowly lot in life. Berg’s style was always a bit more conservative than Schoenberg’s and Webern’s. With traces of tonality in his music, he was by no means so rebellious. A classic example is his Concerto à la mémoire d’un ange (for violin), which has been praised as one of the 20^th century’s most important concertos. It does not strictly adhere to the twelve-note system, giving a feeling of drifting between tonality and atonality.

Besides the unconventionality of Expressionist content, the movement also had to resolve the inherent restrictions of atonality. Abandoning tonality further implied abandoning the conventional logical structure of musical progression, so the most prominent challenge for this new form of music was to bear the weight of a large work. Webern made numerous useful attempts in this aspect. In the earliest days of free atonality, the composer had to integrate the new technique into different forms of music and maintain the inherent logic of the piece’s structure. In his Symphony No. 21, Webern attempted to make the series the direction of the musical progression. This concept pervaded his entire twelve-note system period and had a strong impact on the abovementioned Boulez and American composer John Cage Jr.

Implications of Atonality for Modern Music

The Second Viennese School should not just be thought of as a school of music but should be investigated within its unique social vocabulary. Their creation of a new music style was an artistic projection of social behavior, a true picture of the psychological pain of people living through the wars and social tumult of the first half of the 20^th century. The two world wars and the especially pronounced racial oppression in Germany between them kept society shrouded in the smoke of war and pain, so it is not difficult to understand why Expressionist music was always a display of extremely negative feelings. The trauma of war not only caused physical wounds but also upheaval to the social order and a collapse of people’s values. As a Jew, Schoenberg was expelled from Germany by Hitler and the Nazis and had no choice but to move to the US. At that time, the three composers’ work was banned in Germany.

The extreme psychological states of people (the anxiety and fear of loneliness, helplessness, and great suffering along with subconscious restlessness and impulsiveness) were the focal points of Expressionist music as they were feelings experienced but unable to be verbally expressed by ordinary people. Only art could allow these complex, difficult-to-grasp feelings hidden away in the dark to be understood. In China’s current era of peace, the pain of war is quite remote from us, so if we go and listen to irritating, weird Expressionist music, it will be hard to understand. This may be why atonality has steadily declined since its 20th-century heyday. Nonetheless, Expressionism left its mark on history, and its music is presented not only in the sheet music but also in the traces of human social development of a time that should not be forgotten, or the trauma caused by war that should not be forgotten. War seems to be so far from us as peace currently pervades much of the world, but there is still the cruel killing and terrible pain of war in some places. The value and significance of Expressionist music lie not only in the spirit of artistic rebellion and boundless creativity but also, at a deeper level, in the fact that fear reminds us to be empathetic, face difficulties head on, and cherish the present.

A Brief Look at This Season

This season, the NCPA Orchestra will perform some works from the Second Viennese School: Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 16, Webern’s Symphony No. 21, and Berg’s Lyric Suite, as well as Second Viennese School interpretations of Brahms’ Piano Quartet No. 1 (arranged by Schoenberg) and Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 (chamber version, arranged by Erwin Stein).

Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 16, written in 1909, is an iconic atonal piece influenced by late-period Romanticism. Each of the five has a title: Premonitions, The Past, Summer Morning by a Lake: Chord-Colors, Peripeteia, and The Obbligato Recitative. Though it is atonal, ascending series leitmotifs and their many changes run through the work to maintain a sense of unity throughout.

When Berg wrote Lyric Suite in 1925 and 1926, the Second Viennese School was at a key point in its transformation from free atonality to the twelve-note system, and this piece was Berg’s initial in the twelve-note system. Besides continuing the Expressionist pursuit of restrained sound, the end of the final movement contains an adaptation of the theme from Wagner’s prelude to Tristan and Isolde. With the metaphor of the “Tristan chord,” it hints at the arrival of another creative moment in history.

Besides being composers, the members of the Second Viennese School worked hard on writing rearrangements of work by Mahler and later composers to make the pieces more modern. To promote composition and rearrangements, Schoenberg founded the Society for Private Musical Performances as a platform for ambitious youngsters with artistic ideals. While making new creations and rearrangements, members actively promoted their novel artistic concepts to make their music more influential. However, with limited funding and the war, the society was disbanded in 1921. Nonetheless, its establishment left us classic rearrangements, such as a rearrangement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 (chamber version), written by Stein, a pupil of Schoenberg. Schoenberg himself rearranged Brahms’ Piano Quartet No. 1. Brahms and Mahler are outstanding icons of the late Romantic period, and though they were not proponents of atonality, their work was followed and rearranged by atonal composers, manifesting a respect for the traditional by the modern avant-garde.