Question 3:
Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire looked to explorer the relationship between various tones. Schoenberg loves the blatant, almost brutal dissonance his song produces because it explorers a part of music not previously seen before. A member of the audience described the performance as “enharmonies that almost made the ears bleed, the eyes water, the scalp to freeze.” The audience as a whole disapproved this work. The atonality of this work leads to the general distain of this work by the Berlin public. This exploration of sound is similar to the art of Kazimir Malevich and various abstract painters. Kazimir Malevich’s White on White is a painting that is two white squares; the purpose of this painting is to explore how different colors interact with each other. While Malevich explores the way that different colors affect each other, Schoenberg explorers the way that different tones sound when put together. Schoenberg and composers who also explored with this dissonant music seemed to be searching for “the borderland between pain and pleasure,” which had not previously been explored. Although sporadically dissonant, Schoenberg looked to expand the way people listened to and created music. And although Schoenberg’s music is not what the future held as was believed by many critics. His music had a profound impact on music.