Second Viennese School

Vienna (capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) is a significant musical and cultural centre and a prominent source of musical activity with rich history and tradition. It was home to two influential schools of thought: namely the First Viennese School (formed during the Classical era and featured Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert) and the Second Viennese School (featuring Arnold Schoenberg and two of his most well-known pupils, Alban Berg and Anton Webern). The Second Viennese School in particular developed a new and radically different style of music that encompasses atonality,

Expressionism, and (quite often) the use of the twelve-tone method. Twelve-tone music (or dodecaphonic music), which was originally developed by Schoenberg (and later further developed and expanded by Berg and Webern as they incorporated aspects of this method into their compositions), was a system of musical composition that involves the twelve pitches of the octave and served as the inspiration and source of exploration for many composers that came after. Instead of favouring program music, they revived the appreciation, heralded the return of absolute music, and embraced the contrapuntal traditions of past eras while denying the lush sentimentality of Romanticism.