2nd Viennese School

[Eleison]

I find these composers interesting because in my opinion they are not really modernists and yet their idiom became synonymous with musical modernism.  The way I was taught about the development of the twelve tone technique was that Schoenberg, after realizing that tonality had become completely obscure in Wagner began to ignore tonality altogether.  What resulted was music without an external structure like a melodic mode which is like an abstract 'space' within which a melody can occur.  This lack of structure led him to adopt a system whereby an entire piece is derived from a melodic phrase, but to avoid simply returning to tonal music Schoenberg used a method of constructing the phrase which ensured a complete lack of tonal implications.

When I look at it this way serial music is not merely an abstract 'academic' construction, but simply a pragmatic way of dealing with a musical problem.  Of course atonality has inherent problems, but no more so than those encountered in late tonal music, such as Wagner, which is incredibly convoluted and obscure.  I suppose my point is that Schoenberg and Berg (not so much Webern), shouldn't be categorized as dry modernists but rather as post-romantic composers.

[Ungeheuer]

Thank you, I was making the same point in another thread.