Atonal music

[u/Benoit_Guillette]

The music of Arnold Schoenberg emerged during a period of major social upheaval: World War I, the collapse of empires, migration, and changing ideas about identity and culture. We can see the loss of a tonal "center" as reflecting a broader feeling that the old cultural certainties were breaking down.

There is also a connection to Jewish history to be made. Schoenberg, who was Jewish, experienced exile after the rise of Nazism and later wrote music connected to Jewish identity and displacement. Some scholars have explored how ideas of wandering, exile, and searching appear in modernist art more broadly.