DEATH OF A REVOLUTIONARY
ROBABLY no composer had such a far-reaching influence on modern music as Arnold Schoenberg, who died in Los Angeles on July 14 at the age of 76. It is likely that he will be remembered not for his own compositions but as the father of atonalism, an uncompromising revolutionary whose life was dedicated to "the emancipation of dissonance," who took the soft harmonies out and replaced them with harsh sounds and jangling discords. The twelve-tone technique which Schoenberg and his followers practised simply used the seven tones of the tonic sol-fa plus the five half-notes that come in between them, that is, the full chromatic scale in an octave. But the music it produced was highly intellectual, hard to listen to and, according to some critics, barren and sterile. In 1933 the Vienna-born composer left Nazi Germany for America, where he remained teaching until his death.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 633, 17 August 1951, Page 19
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150DEATH OF A REVOLUTIONARY New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 633, 17 August 1951, Page 19
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