The Second Viennese School The Second Viennese School was a set of three composers: Arnold Schoenburg, Anton

Webern, and Alban Berg. Schoenburg was the music teacher of the other two, and together, they expanded tonality and implemented the use of Schoenburgs twelve tone technique and atonality with a totally chromatic expressionism.

For Pierrot Lunaire, Schnberg invented the technique of Sprechstimme, a form of vocalization somewhere between speaking and actual singing. The unique, bizarre quality of Sprechstimme became a staple of the vocal writing of the atonal, expressionist composers. After a time, Schnberg felt he needed to impose some form or constraints on the use of free tonality, and to that end he developed dodecaphony or the twelve-tone system, involving the systematic use of all twelve tones of the chromatic scale. This method involves the composer choosing a row consisting of all twelve notes, and then building the piece by using the row, or sections of it, either melodically or harmonically, forward, backward, inverted, or in retrograde inversion. Schnberg's first works in this style were for solo piano, written in the early 1920s.

Bergs music is the most suggestive of the post-romanticism of Wagner and Mahler. His opera, Wozzeck, was given its first performance at the Berlin State Opera in 1925, and was received with a mixture of horror, admiration, heavy criticism, awe and perception. Atonal and highly Expressionistic, yet tightly constructed, the fifteen musical scenes all being based on older musical forms. Berg also embraced the twelve-tone system developed by Schoenberg, his mentor and music teacher.

Webern studied with Schoenberg from 1904-08 and produced the Passacaglia for orchestra in 1908. This work is steeped in the post-romanticism of the late Brahmsian style. For the next several years, Webern continually refined his compositional style, his music becoming more and more compact and brief. During the 1920s, Webern's compositions had become so concentrated that many last only a few minutes in length, while some scarcely last even a minute. These works contain no musical rhetoric, no development. There exists only a new structure of thinking: pure tonal organization. Among his mature works in this style are the String trio, a Symphony, and the Concerto for nine instruments, all written between 1927 and 1934.