Arnold Schoenberg

Born Arnold Franz Walter Schönberg September 13, 1874, Vienna, Austria – July 13, 1951, Los Angeles, USA.

Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils Anton Webern (1883-1945) and Alban Berg (1885-1935) are known as the Second Viennese School. Schoenberg was one of the early experimenters to explore the idea of atonality.

Composer, artist, music teacher. He was largely self-taught, and in his 20s lived by orchestrating operettas while composing such early works as the string sextet "Verklärte Nacht" (1899, "Transfigured Night"). His search for a personal musical style emerged in these works.

He became known for his concept of "12-note" or "serial" music, (a form that Charles Ives had earlier experimented with) and used it in most of his later works. At the end of World War I he taught in Vienna and Berlin, until exiled by the Nazi government in 1933. He settled in California in 1934, having anglicised the spelling of his name, started teaching at UCLA in 1936. and took US nationality in 1941.

He taught John Cage and later described him as "not a composer, but an inventor- of genius"

His influential piece Pierrot Lunaire (1912) developed the idea of Sprechgesang, a spoken singing.

Zappa used the original spelling of Schoenberg's name in both the list of names on the Freak Out! cover and in The Real Frank Zappa Book.