Arnold Schoenberg

Suite for Piano, Opus 25

Arnold Schoenberg was a composer who succeeded in emancipating dissonance to a level of aesthetic beauty. The phrase "Emancipation of Dissonance" was coined by Schoenberg and it was his desire to demonstrate that dissonance, in life as well as music, is not only unavoidable and necessary, but also valuable, indicative of abundant creativity and beautiful. He succeeds with his Suite for Piano, Opus 25, a wonderful paradox of simplicity and complexity.

Composers often use dissonance to create meaning in music. The harshness of dissonant sounds creates a contrast to pleasant sounds. When both types of sounds are used together the result is that relationships evolve within the music that carry meaning and emotion.

Schoenberg opened a new dimension of meaning and emotion in music when he began his tone-row compositions. His tone-row compositions not only utilize dissonance, but are created using ONLY dissonance.

The sculpture above is a visual example of Schoenberg's dissonance. The colorful notes have no specific order, nor size, nor color organization. They symbolize chaos which is the sound one hears when listening to Schoenberg's tone-row compositions. The irony is that Schoenberg's music is created with a strict structure. If you examine the sculpture closely you can see that the notes hang from a square. The square represents equality and simplicity. It is also the number of tone-rows that Schoenberg uses in his Suite for Piano, Opus 25. There is an original tone-row (made of the 12 notes possible in a given octave on the piano), its inversion and 2 retrograde inversions = 4. These 4 tone-rows are used several hundred times in Schoenberg's piano suite, never repeating exactly the same way, and always overlapping. The resulting musical composition sounds like pure dissonance.