Arnold Schoenberg
Overview
 
Arnold Schoenberg (ˈaːʁnɔlt ˈʃøːnbɛʁk; 13 September 1874 – 13 July 1951) was an Austria
Austria
Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...

n composer, associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School
Second Viennese School
The Second Viennese School is the group of composers that comprised Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils and close associates in early 20th century Vienna, where he lived and taught, sporadically, between 1903 and 1925...

. He used the spelling Schönberg until after his move to the United States in 1934 (Steinberg 1995, 463), whereupon he altered it to Schoenberg "in deference to American practice" (Foss 1951, 401), though one writer claims he made the change a year earlier (Ross 2007, 45).

Schoenberg's approach, both in terms of harmony and development, is among the major landmarks of 20th-century musical thought; at least three generations of composers in the European and American traditions have consciously extended his thinking or, in some cases, passionately reacted against it.
Quotations

I am the slave of an internal power more powerful than my education.

If music is frozen architecture|architecture, then the Potpourri(music)|potpourri is frozen coffee-table gossip... Potpourri is the art of adding apples to pears…

Arnold Schoenberg: "Glosses on the Theories of Others" (1929), See "Style and Idea", Faber and Faber 1985, p.313-314

My music is not difficult, my music is played badly.

 
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