PIERROT LUNAIRE, BY ARNOLD SCHOENBERG.

PIERROT LUNAIRE, BY ARNOLD SCHOENBERG

KAYJATTA.

My personal listening experience of Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire is that the music is very poetic, emotional, and dramatic as well. The musical instruments reflect the emotions displayed through the vocal technique.

This piece expands my view of music as an art form because of Schoenberg’s illustration of expressionism in art (painting particularly, but also in poetry and psychoanalysis) in music.

Schoenberg’s personal experience as a painter, and his inspiration by the symbolist poet Albert Giraud and Freudian school of psychology are all reflected in his music, especially in Pierrot Lunaire.

Schoenberg’s music differs from the music of the other periods before in that he totally abolished the tonal system. In Pierrot Lunaire, for example the distinction between consonance and dissonance completely disappeared. Schoenberg , an earlier proponent of Brahms and Mahler, became an “atonal expressionist”, meaning his music was free of tonality based around the home key and that he was an expressionist drawing inspiration largely from painting and poetry.

Schoenberg’s music strove to unify music and the spoken word through the spoken voice. He also attempted to perfect “tone-color-melody” where each note of a melody is played by a different instrument.