Expressionism: Arnold SChoenberg

Expressionism At the beginning of the 20th century, an artistic movement arose that rejected impressionism and realism at the same time. It valued the expression of personal feelings to the point of distorting reality to evoke deep, overwhelming emotion. The expressionist movement existed in most of the arts, including visual art, literature, drama and music. While impressionism usually tried to portray fleeting, subtle sensations of nature, expressionism usually tried to portray heart-rending, even nightmarish feelings experienced by a person in extraordinary circumstances.

Expressionism in Music Expressionist music is “super- romantic”: It took the goal of expressing personal feelings to the extreme by stretching the rules of harmony and form. It used unprecedented levels of dissonance and almost no classical forms to achieve visceral emotional reactions in listeners. Often the depiction of fear and nightmarish conditions was at the center of expressionist songs.

Arnold Schoenberg Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) was a Jewish-Austrian composer and painter. Early in his career he wrote expressionistic music that stretched and broke classical harmonic rules. Later, he wrote atonal music (music that doesn’t follow harmonic rules at all),and finally he came up with a new system to organize pitches in a song called 12-Tone or Serialism. Atonal music example He left Europe 1933 as the Nazi government denounced his work as degenerate Jewish music. He taught at USC and UCLA for a while.

“Verklärte Nacht” (Transfigured Night) Based on a German poem that describes a man and woman walking through a dark forest on a moonlit night. The woman shares a dark secret with her new boyfriend: she is pregnant with the child of her old boyfriend. The stages of the poem are reflected in the song, beginning with the sadness of the woman's confession, a nervous interlude wherein the man reflects upon the confession, and a finale reflecting the man's bright acceptance of the woman and her child. In your journal, describe the emotions you feel the music conveying about the characters in the story. https://youtu.be/5h5Xc-rUef4