second Viennese school
The collective term for Arnold Schoenberg and his students Alban Berg and Anton Webern, who developed atonality and the twelve-tone technique in early 20th-century Vienna.
In Depth
The Second Viennese School (contrasted with the "First Viennese School" of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven) refers to Schoenberg and his two most significant students. Together, they effected the most radical transformation of Western musical language since the birth of tonal harmony. Schoenberg's evolution from late-Romantic chromaticism through free atonality to the systematic twelve-tone method (1923) charted a path that dominated art music discourse for decades. Berg softened twelve-tone technique with Romantic expressivity — his opera Wozzeck and Violin Concerto are among the most emotionally powerful works of the century. Webern compressed the method into miniatures of crystalline precision — his complete works fit on a few CDs. Their collective influence was enormous: after World War II, Boulez, Stockhausen, and the Darmstadt school built on their ideas, and serialism became the dominant academic compositional approach. The backlash against this dominance (from minimalists, neoromantic composers, and others) is itself a testament to the Second Viennese School's centrality.
Webern's entire published output lasts about three hours in total — yet these incredibly concentrated miniatures influenced virtually every major composer of the second half of the 20th century.