Born: 1874, Vienna, Austria
Died: 1951, Los Angeles
Period: Modern

Arnold Schoenberg’s first major works, Transfigured Night and Gurrelieder, were in the Late Romantic style, but his musical vocabulary gradually moved towards atonalism. After World War I, Schoenberg began developing a system of composition that caused a paradigm shift in western music, his “twelve-tone” or serial system, so called because it used a serial arrangement of all twelve tones of the western scale as the thematic basis of a composition.

Selected works:

Transfigured Night, Op. 4 (string sextet, 1898)

Gurrelieder (cantata for voices and orchestra, 1903)

Five Orchestral Pieces, Op. 16 (1909)

Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21 (for voice and chamber ensemble, 1912)

Moses und Aron (opera, incomplete)