How Schoenberg Evolved Away From Tonality

Schoenberg and beauty are wordsthat rarely occupy the same sentence. Arguably the most influentialcomposer of all time, his fame derived from his abolition oftonality—the harmonic system of the previous centuries, in whichmelodies and harmonies relate to the tonic (the home) of a given key.While detractors still demonise him for having destroyed music, thelargely self-taught Schoenberg saw his work as a logical evolution oftradition. Frustrated that tonality seemed exhausted and had reach