Schliesse mir die Augen beide (Second Setting, twelve-tone, 1925)

Instrumentation

Collections

Musical Terms (2)

• twelve-tone technique German
  Zwölftontechnik — the compositional method developed by Arnold Schoenberg from 1921 in which all twelve pitches of the chromatic scale are arranged into a fixed series (row) and the composition is derived from that row and its systematic transformations (inversion, retrograde, retrograde inversion) at all twelve transpositions. Berg was the last of the three Second Viennese School composers to adopt the technique. His first twelve-tone work was the second setting of 'Schliesse mir die Augen beide' (1925). Unlike Webern's strict application, Berg used the row flexibly — often hiding tonal references and familiar intervals within the row itself, as famously in the Violin Concerto.
  Berg's twelve-tone music does not feel like a mathematical exercise because he deliberately chose or constructed rows with tonal implications. In the second 'Schliesse mir die Augen beide', the row itself contains triadic fragments. When learning Berg's twelve-tone works, trace the row through the texture to understand the architecture, but then perform from the musical surface — the expressivity, the phrasing, the voice-leading.
• Second Viennese School English
  The informal name for the group of composers centred on Arnold Schoenberg in early 20th-century Vienna, including Alban Berg and Anton Webern as his two principal students. The term distinguishes them from the 'First Viennese School' of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. The Second Viennese School developed free atonality (c.1908–1921) and then the twelve-tone technique (from 1921), transforming the harmonic language of Western music. Berg, Webern, and Schoenberg each took the techniques in radically different directions: Schoenberg rigorously systematic, Webern compressed and serial, Berg warmly expressive and resistant to rigid doctrine.
  Understanding the Second Viennese School places Berg's piano music in its full context. The Piano Sonata Op.1 sits at the threshold of the new language — deeply Romantic in feeling, atonally adventurous in syntax. Approach it as a late-Romantic work that has gone too far to turn back, not as an academic exercise in new technique.