Second Viennese School

The Second Viennese School was a group of early 20th-century composers centered on Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern. Its members developed atonal music and, especially through Schoenberg, twelve-tone composition.

Atonality: Music that lacks a governing tonal center or key. The school’s early music made atonality a defining compositional approach.
Arnold Schoenberg: An Austrian composer who developed atonal composition and the twelve-tone method. He founded the circle and supplied its most influential compositional innovations.
Pierrot lunaire: Schoenberg’s 1912 melodrama for voice and chamber ensemble, featuring Sprechstimme. Its unusual vocal style and atonal language mark a pivotal stage in Schoenberg’s development.
Vienna: Austria’s capital, a major center of European music and intellectual life. The school formed within Vienna’s musical institutions and artistic networks.
Serialism: A compositional approach that organizes musical elements through ordered series. Later composers extended twelve-tone ordering beyond pitch, especially after Webern’s example.
Twelve-tone technique: A method of composition that organizes all twelve pitch classes through an ordered series. Schoenberg developed this method to structure music without a tonal hierarchy.
Alban Berg: An Austrian composer whose works combine modernist techniques with expressive and dramatic elements. His operas and instrumental music gave the school’s innovations a distinctive lyrical voice.
Wozzeck: Berg’s opera, premiered in 1925, depicting the social and psychological collapse of a soldier. It shows how atonal modernism could sustain a large-scale dramatic opera.
Late Romanticism: A late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century musical style marked by expanded harmony and expressive scale. The school’s early works extended and then challenged the harmonic language of late Romantic music.
Darmstadt Summer Courses: Postwar music courses in Germany that became a major center for avant-garde composition. Composers at Darmstadt debated and extended the school’s methods after the Second World War.

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