Expressionism in Music: Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern

Each of the composers on this program went through an Expressionist phase after they abandoned Late Romanticism and before they embraced twelve-tone music. During this period, they explored how music can be used to communicate emotional disequilibrium, dreams, and subconscious experience when it becomes untethered from conventional tonality. While Expressionism shared with Impressionism some of the same motivations and the preoccupation with tone color, Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern followed a different path from Debussy's.

Join our host Robert to examine some of the preeminent works in this genre, including Pierrot Lunaire and Wozzeck. Our focus will be how to listen to this kind of music and to examine how it manages to express anything without a tonal framework.