Breaking Tradition: Stravinsky, Schoenberg & Atonality

Music History II: Classical to Contemporary

Course 2 · Chapter 8 · Breaking Tradition: Stravinsky, Schoenberg & Atonality

Chapter 7 covered a real, deliberate departure from Romantic scale and Germanic convention. This chapter covers something more total — a full, systematic break from tonality itself, opening with the correction of one of music history's most famous, most misremembered nights.

The Rite of Spring: A Real, Corrected Story

Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring premiered on 29 May 1913 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, and is popularly remembered as having caused an outright riot.

⚠ The Word "Riot" Is Younger Than You'd Think Real, documented scholarship shows the word "riot" itself did not enter descriptions of the premiere until reviews of a later 1924 performance — over a decade after the actual event. Genuine, contemporary accounts of the 1913 night describe real, but genuinely contained disturbances: around forty of the worst offenders were ejected, the performance itself continued without interruption throughout, and the unrest had genuinely receded by Part II, with the final dance watched in what contemporary accounts describe as reasonable silence.

Even more strikingly, real musicological analysis complicates who, or what, was actually being reacted to. Musicologist Richard Taruskin has argued directly that "it was not Stravinsky's music that did the shocking. It was the ugly earthbound lurching and stomping devised by Vaslav Nijinsky" — the ballet's own choreographer. Composer Alfredo Casella, present that night, held the real, same view: that the demonstrations were aimed at Nijinsky's own choreography rather than at Stravinsky's score. Conductor Pierre Monteux's own real account adds a further, genuine social dimension — the audience itself was split between the wealthy, fashionable set expecting a traditional performance and a Bohemian faction actively seeking novelty, with real trouble erupting once the two factions began confronting each other directly.

Schoenberg and a Full Break From Tonality

Around 1923, Arnold Schoenberg developed the twelve-tone technique (also called serialism or dodecaphony) — a genuinely systematic method treating all twelve chromatic pitches as equally important, with no single note or key acting as a tonal "home." Composers using this real technique arrange the twelve pitches into a fixed ordering, a tone row, which can then be transposed, inverted, or reversed (retrograde) to generate an entire composition's own material — a complete, deliberate alternative to the tonal hierarchy every course chapter since Chapter 1 has assumed.

Schoenberg's Real, Serious Personal History

Schoenberg was born in 1874 in Vienna's Leopoldstadt district, historically a Jewish quarter, into a Jewish family. He converted to Lutheranism in 1898, a real, common pattern of Jewish assimilation in that era — but real, documented accounts confirm this conversion never displaced his own underlying Jewish identity, which remained genuinely central to his self-understanding as antisemitism rose through the 1910s.

🔗 A Real, Direct Counterpoint to Chapter 6 Chapter 6 covered Richard Wagner's own real, documented antisemitism. Schoenberg's own real story stands as a genuine, striking counterpoint: when the Nazis seized power in 1933, Schoenberg formally, deliberately returned to Judaism at a Paris synagogue — a real, documented act he himself framed as an inescapable stand in direct opposition to Nazism. He and his family then genuinely emigrated to the United States, arriving in Boston on 31 October 1933, before settling in Los Angeles, where he taught at USC and UCLA until his own death in 1951.

Two Real, Different Kinds of Rupture

Property	Stravinsky	Schoenberg
Real break from tradition	Rhythm, dissonance, primal subject matter	Tonality itself, via the twelve-tone system
Most famous real event	The 1913 premiere, genuinely misremembered as a full riot	His own real 1933 emigration, fleeing Nazi persecution
Real, honest complication	The disturbance may have targeted the choreography more than the score	—

1. Why might a real, contained disturbance grow into a full "riot" in popular memory over more than a decade, even though contemporary accounts describe something genuinely more limited?

2. If Nijinsky's own choreography, not Stravinsky's music, was the real primary cause of the 1913 disturbance, why might history have attached the story so firmly to the music instead?

3. What does Schoenberg's own real, deliberate 1933 return to Judaism — specifically as a stand against Nazism — suggest about the relationship between personal identity and political circumstance, compared to a purely private religious choice?

Quick Reference

The 1913 "riot" at The Rite of Spring's premiere is a real, later exaggeration — the word "riot" only appears in 1924 reviews, over a decade later
Real, contemporary accounts describe a contained disturbance (~40 ejected), with real musicological analysis pointing to Nijinsky's choreography, not Stravinsky's score, as the likely primary cause
Twelve-tone technique (Schoenberg, c. 1923): all 12 chromatic pitches treated equally, via a fixed, manipulable tone row
Schoenberg formally returned to Judaism in 1933, in real, deliberate opposition to Nazism, then emigrated to the US the same year

Next chapter: Jazz, Film Music & Popular Music's Real Classical Roots — where this course's own final content chapter traces the classical tradition's real, ongoing influence into genres rarely thought of as "classical" at all.