Arnold Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg

Compared to Arnold Schoenberg’s expressive music, Debussy’s Clair de lune can be regarded as a complete opposition to Expressionism. While Schoenberg’s music revealed the naked and deep feeling of human with the least decorative and the most direct way, Debussy’s Clair de lune blurred all the feelings brought by the nature and mixed them together into a smooth and pleasing dream. After reading the texts of Pierrot Lunaire by GiraudIn, I failed to find any connection to Schoenberg’s Serenade; however, the content does help me understand the bizarre atonality better. If other people ask me about the first impression of Schoenberg or a brief introduction to him, I completely consider him as an expressionist. For some of the Expressionist paintings, the aesthetic effort is to “give a deepened expression and intensification of the essence, instead of hasty impression”(Albright, 74), with the same ultimate purpose, Schoenberg made all the mixed and anxious feelings audible in his creations, which are especially expressed with the absence of tonic and large amount of dissonance. The idea of atonality is to reveal the deepest feelings without any constraint rules bound. Their absences of conscious mental control and against mainstream’s taste in music are what truly drive the followers.

 

 

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