by John Sarkis

Created on: August 20, 2011

Right around the time of Debussy, composers started to think outside the box of traditional harmony. Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner started it all really, yet they themselves were ardent romantics, so how it did all come about? It was precisely because they were ardent romantics that change came about. Wagner’s music gradually and gradually became so intense, that harmonic rules were broken in order to accommodate his personal emotions. Wagner, for the first time ever, used chords with little to no relationship to each other. Liszt even went as far as writing atonal music, but he didn’t do a very good job at it; however, Liszt did influence composers much greater than himself, such as: Mahler, Strauss, Schoenberg, Stravinsky  and Shostakovich....

Arnold Schoenberg came into the scene. Schoenberg questioned “the big tune” concept in music like no one else did before him or since. He felt that all the romantics had said all there was to say: Beethoven, Berlioz, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, etc..., when will it all end? You can’t write more emotional and dramatic music than they did, so where do we go from here? One composer which interested Schoenberg a great deal, was Brahms. How did Brahms manage to write emotional, yet not overly dramatic music at the same time? Tchaikovsky and Liszt were not able to accomplish this feat. Schoenberg also admired composers like Chopin, whom he felt offered a more passive and poetic alternative to the typical “big tune romantic” composers.

Schoenberg then set out to do something never done before, he decided to make music more logical, instead of emotional. The end result was the 12 tone row. Not only are all notes treated equally in the 12 tone row system, but traditional harmony becomes obsolete, because there is no tonal center to reference back to. Music is made up of scales. The most important parts of the musical scale are the I, IV and the Vaka Tonic, Subdominant and Dominant points. When you hear a musical composition, be it classical, romantic, popular, traditional, etc..., you’ll notice a recurring and central theme taking place. This occurs in all music, whether it’s by Beethoven or The Beatles, music is music. You can sing along any popular music song, but you can also hum the love theme from Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet. Reason being, these compositions all have a main recognizable theme to them. The 12 tone has none of this, because, no importance or emphasis is given to any theme or note throughout the musical composition. This is most strenuous on the human ear, because there’s no coherency or focal point whatsoever.

Yet, logically and mathematically speaking, Schoenberg was ahead of just about any other composer in history, be it Beethoven, Tchaikovsky or The Beatles. When no emphasis is given to a melody, it creates just that - no melody! Schoenberg was an intellectual genius, but he was a mental midget when it came to supplying the masses a tune they could sing to, hence the reason he’s not big in box offices around the world today.

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