PRIVATE EDUCATION ASSISTANCE COMMITTEE

Trustee of the Fund for Assistance to Private Education

SAN ISIDRO ACADEMY OF MOISES PADILLA, NEG. OCC., INC.
Roxas St., Moises Padilla, Negros Occidental
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He used subtle yet ravishing harmonies for his orchestra and piano. His music resulted from a variety of style that
resulted from his love for a variety of music including French Baroque, Bach, Mozart, and Chopin, Spanish folk
traditions and music American jazz and blues. His works were of extraordinarily high quality, a mastermind of
melodies and orchestration, richly evocative harmonies andinventive instrumental textures and effects. In 1937, Ravel
underwent a brain surgery. After this, he appeared to be recovering but he lapsed into a coma and died nine days
after on December 28th 1937. Ravel was buried alongside his parents in a granite tomb at the cemetery at Levallois-
Perret located in the suburbs of northwest Paris. Today, he remains widely regarded as France’s most popular
composer. He is remembered for one stating, “The only love affair I have ever had was with music.”

EXPRESSIONISM
Expressionism is a term that embraces an early 20th century style of art, music and literature. It is a movement or
tendency that strives to express subjective feelings and emotions rather than to depict reality or nature objectively. It
is an art style characterized chiefly by heavy, often black lines that define forms, sharply contrasting, often vivid
colors, and subjective or symbolic treatment of thematic material. The subject is also frequently caricatured,
exaggerated, distorted, or otherwise altered in order to stress the emotional experience in its most intense and
concentrated form. Expressionism movement was a reaction to Impressionism, the academic standards that had
prevailed in Europe since the Renaissance, particularly in French and German art academies. Expressionist painters
sought to express their feelings about what they saw. It was a more active, more subjective type of modern art.
Expressionism in music, which crested between the two world wars, gave voice to the anxieties, inner terrors, and
cynicism of human life in the 20th century through emotionally intense, musically complex, and carefully structured
works. Conventional techniques were distorted, and pretty harmonies were avoided in favor of dissonant, complex
ones used with great power. The music is often atonal or distorts traditional tonality. Polyphony interweaving of
melodic lines) is often dense, and melody in the traditional sense is often unrecognizable.

Characteristics of expressionism in music:

a. episodic, fragmentary form and structure
b. abrupt musical language
c. clashing dissonances
d. interest in common man
e. tonality, triadic harmony, and consonance vs. dissonance are not valid anymore
f. abstract procedures
h. great emotional intensity
The term expressionism “was probably first applied to music in 1918, especially to Schoenberg” because like the
painter Kandinsky he avoided “traditional forms of beauty” to convey powerful feelings in his music. Arnold
Schoenberg, Anton Webern and Alban Berg were considered members of the Second Viennese School.

Arnold Schoenberg
Trivia: Did you know that Arnold Schoenberg was terrified of the number 13? His
triskaidekaphobia( fear of the number 13) was so intense that he even changed the title of one of his
songs so that it wouldn’t have thirteen letters.
Born: September 13, 1874, Leopoldstadt, Austria
Died: July 13, 1951, Los Angeles, California, United States
Period: Der Blaue Reiter
Compositions: Pierrot Lunaire, Verklärte Nacht, Gurrelieder, etc.
Artwork: Der rote Blick, Blauer Blick, Blauer Self-Portrait, Gehendes Selbst-Portrait, Christus,
Denken, Hass
Movies: Moses and Aaron
Arnold Franz Walter Schoenberg was born on September 13, 1874 to lower middle class family in Vienna, Austria.
His parents Pauline Nachod and Samuel Schoenberg had no musical association. His father Samuel was a merchant
who owned a shoe store. Schoenberg was blessed as his parents enjoyed music but they could not contribute much
towards his musical career. His brother Heinrich Schoenberg was a singer. When he was just nine years old, he
started composing and much of what he learned and understood during this time was self-taught. At the age of eight,
he began playing the violin and composed violin duets. At an early age, Schoenberg already showed great skills in
composition. He received his elementary instructions from Oskar Adler who taught him harmony and counter-point,
and studied compositions from Alexander Zemlinsky. Though most of Schoenberg's life was spent in teaching at
various private institutions, he also acquired jobs in orchestrating operettas.
Some musicians are destined to be controversial; Schoenberg was one of them. Although he was largely a self-
taught musician, and his early works are quite traditional, he soon started composing music that was atonal that is not
based on the standard scales musicians used up to the end of the 19th century. He developed a system called twelve-
tone music, in which the twelve chromatic notes of a Western scale are arranged arbitrarily into a “tone row.”
Schoenberg’s first completely twelve-tone composition was his Suite for Piano composed in 1921-1923.

CHROMATIC SCALE

He wrote pieces for string instruments, a symphonic poem, piano pieces instrumental and orchestral works,
monodrama, oratorio, cantata and Opera. Among his most known works are: “Chamber Symphony in E major,”
Second String Quartet,” “Opus 11, No. 1,” “Five Orchestral Pieces, Opus 16,” etc,. His early music represents the