The summer countdown continues.
As we enter the last weeks of the traditional school year, we know many of you are busy prepping end-of-season recitals, rounding out annual student assessments, and formulating lesson plans for the fall semester.
These feats are far from small. And you’re probably very tired––if not starting to question your life choices. (Kidding.)
We figured we’d pop in to remind you what you do makes a real difference. And it can ripple effect its way through generations.
We mean it.
Following up on our Nadia Boulanger post from last December, we’re continuing our full-throated celebration of music’s tirelessly talented, fiercely impactful educators with a brand-new teacher profile.
In today’s spotlight:
Arnold Schönberg.
Hang on, though. Don’t panic.
We know Schönberg the composer is an acquired taste, and loads of musicians are inclined to head for the nearest exit at the mere mention of his name.*
But don’t expect this profile to be all 12-tone-y and chromatic.
Beyond Schönberg’s modernist compositions, he was an impressive and prolific teacher who considered himself more or less a full-time educator throughout much of his career.
Here are seven things you might not know about Arnold Schönberg, teacher at large.
*In his Incomplete and Utter History of Classical Music, Renaissance man Stephen Fry says pronouncing Schönberg’s name has the potential to scare away horses, which is, quite frankly, objectively hilarious.
Name: Arnold Schönberg
Dates: 1874-1951
Nationality: Austrian
Fields: Composition, theory, harmony, form
Studied at: Informal studies, largely with Alexander Zemlinsky
Taught at: Prussia Academy of Arts (Berlin), Malkin Conservatory (Boston), University of Southern California, UCLA
#1 His student roster featured many famous names.
Like Nadia Boulanger, Arnold Schönberg had a hand in shaping some of history’s greatest musical minds. (Though Boulanger arguably has him beat if we’re going by sheer numbers).
Most recognizable on Schönberg’s list were Austrians Alban Berg and Anton Webern. Both one-time Schöenberg pupils, the two famously became disciples of Schönberg’s serialist technique––so much so the three composers are now considered chief members of the Second Viennese School, music history’s answer to the earlier Vienna-based Classicists and Romantics. Other members of Schönberg’s European classrooms included Greek composer Nikos Skalkottas, as well as Americans Marc Blitzstein and Henry Cowell.
Emigrating from Europe to Los Angeles in 1934, Schönberg made a point of putting down immediate roots as an educator. “Teaching played an important role [in] my father’s life,” Schönberg’s daughter Nuria Schönberg-Nono said of the composer in 1998, adding, “He taught his whole life long, not just to make a living but because he truly enjoyed it.” Indeed, his passion for teaching, coupled with his global reputation, attracted future and contemporary celebrities such as John Cage and Otto Klemperer, as well as film composers Alfred Newman and David Raksin. Even Dave Brubeck spent a few (reportedly contentious) hours under Schönberg’s tutelage.
#2 He had trouble kicking his teaching habit.
Though best known today as a founding father of 20th-century composition, Schönberg pursued a pedagogical career that spanned nearly six decades. He delighted in analyzing sonatas and chamber symphonies with his pupils and was always thrilled at the prospect of a new student…even as he told himself he should probably quit teaching altogether.
On accepting a conservatory position in 1933, Schönberg jokingly observed:
“[T]eaching is perhaps the only one of my passions that I’ve tried in vain to combat in myself…I teach out of passion, and even if I’ve said a thousand times, ‘I’ve taught for nearly forty years, now,’ I immediately forget all of my wholesome resolutions and dive into new adventures when a new student comes along.” [Translated remarks, October 1933]
#3 12-tone wasn’t his favorite form of pedagogy.
For all that Schönberg has become synonymous with his polarizing 12-tone system, he didn’t necessarily teach this method in his classes. University of Southern California student Leonard Stein––who went on to help Schönberg organize his Structural Functions of Harmony treatise––once said of his professor: “He didn’t teach much from his own music.” Stein elaborated by recalling Schönberg wouldn’t dare critique his students’ songs, citing these as too “spontaneous, too personal” to warrant any outside input or require any superfluous 12-tone treatment.
Similarly, colleague and composer Erwin Stein (no direct relation that we could find) seemed to feel Schönberg’s true teaching talent was his flair for nurturing individual styles, acting as more a mentor to his students than a self-important Svengali. “Schönberg teaches one to think,” Erwin Stein noted. “He urges his students to look with their own open eyes as if they were the first to observe what can be seen.”
#4 He was once commissioned by a member of the Coolidge family.
Yup. That Coolidge family.
By the mid 1920s, Schönberg was a professor at the Prussia Academy of Arts in Berlin, offering lectures and master classes, mostly in…you guessed it…composition. Yet despite his teaching schedule, he remained an active composer himself, completing several works during his academy tenure. Among these was his String Quartet No. 3 (Op. 30), written with financial support from Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, a legendary musical patron.
If Coolidge’s last name sounds familiar, it might be because she was married to Dr. Frederick Shurtleff Coolidge, a member of the prominent Massachusetts family that produced Calvin, aka the 30th President of the United States. And though Dr. Coolidge died in 1915, his wife was so famous in American high society, she rivaled even Calvin’s First Lady, Grace. At the time of Schönberg’s third quartet in 1927, Calvin Coolidge was well into his presidency, and Elizabeth was widely known as “the other Mrs. Coolidge.”
Schönberg, still living in Germany, was essentially one step away from the White House.
#5 He had other big-name patrons, but not all of them were fans.
A young Schönberg reportedly enjoyed professional backing from both Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler, though neither of these supporters would’ve called themselves Schönberg fanatics.
Mahler made no secret of the fact he simply didn’t get Schönberg’s music (though he conceded it was important to the development of Western music as a whole). And Strauss? His later thoughts on Schönberg live in the pantheon of history’s most savage musical burns:
“[Schönberg]’d be better off shoveling snow than scribbling on manuscript paper.”
Brutal words. Especially considering Strauss’s Salome (1905) laid much of the groundwork for Schönberg’s own “post-tonal style.” (Those in glass houses…)
#6 For Schönberg, sometimes less was more.
Reminiscing about his one-on-ones with Schönberg, composer and academic Leonard Stein admitted the legendary tutor left him with very few words of wisdom. If any.
Upon presenting Schönberg with a piano piece he’d written, Stein received just a single sentence of feedback:
“It’s either too short, or it’s too long.”
Evidently, Schönberg the teacher favored a hands-off approach, encouraging his students to work through their compositional challenges by themselves. He’s credited as saying:
“I’ve never taught simply what I knew but instead more what the student needed.”
#7 Much of his personal library was lost in 2025.
Since Schönberg lived out the last chapter of his life in LA, it made perfect sense his family would choose that same city as a permanent home for the composer’s catalog and personal papers. After his death, his expansive library became California’s Belmont Music Publishers (est. 1965), and, in the ensuing years, the facility functioned as a “bridge” between Schönberg’s music and those who wished to study and/or perform his works. At last count, Belmont’s physical holdings in LA’s Pacific Palisades amounted to over 100,000 assets, including Schönberg manuscripts marked up by the likes of Claudio Abbado and Zubin Metha.
Then came 2025.
Sadly, Belmont’s repository was caught in the deadly wildfire path in January of that year, and all but 16 books were reduced to rubble. The loss has been described as both “profound” and catastrophic for music history as well as for posterity, and news of the library’s destruction garnered international headlines.
Thankfully, a large portion of Schönberg’s original scores remain intact at the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna, and the composer’s American descendants have committed to a large-scale digitization project in partnership with the Austrian organization. Those interested in helping to secure Schönberg’s manuscripts for future generations can visit the Center’s donation page here.
Curious to learn more about Schönberg’s legacy and teachings? Some resources to check out:
- The Arnold Schönberg Center website, where you can peruse the Center’s catalog, listen to historical recordings, and discover upcoming exhibitions and events.
- Excerpts from Hofstra University’s 2024 Schönberg Symposium, which include a close reading of letters between Schönberg and student and friend Anton Webern. (There are other symposium videos available on the Hofstra YouTube main channel page.)
- The Belmont Music Publishers catalog, which appears to have some pedagogical books, scores, and memorabilia available for purchase despite the recent fires. The site also encourages musicians to reach out with any requests while the library works to rebuild its archive.
- Dr. Barrett Ashley Johnson’s Training the Composer, which compares the teaching methods of Schönberg and Boulanger.
Lesson over for now, folks.
No matter what you’re going through at the moment, it can’t be worse than having someone like John Cage come to your studio asking you to review 4’33’’. (It doesn’t look like this actually happened, but can you imagine??)
Wishing you an end to the year in which the only chromatic stress you feel is inside the music.
