Approximately 22 minutes

Composer: born September 13, 1874, Vienna; died July 13, 1953, Los Angeles, CA

Work composed: 1906 for 15 instruments; rev. April 1935 for large orchestra

World premiere: Schoenberg led the premiere of the original version on February 8, 1907, in Vienna. He also conducted the first performance of his revised version for large orchestra in Los Angeles in 1935.

Instrumentation: flute, oboe, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, bassoon, contrabassoon, 2 horns, and strings

“Now I have established my style. Now I know how I have to compose,” declared Arnold Schoenberg in 1906, upon completing his Kammersymphonie No. 1. Of course, with the benefit of more than a century’s worth of hindsight, we can look back at Schoenberg’s entire body of work and see that his music continued evolving long after 1906. Today, Schoenberg is best known for his invention of a non-tonal system of composition, known as 12-tone or serialist music. Op. 9 is a transitional piece, a fulcrum, between Schoenberg’s earlier music, which reflects post-Romantic and early Expressionist Viennese/German trends of the early 20th century, and the distinctive originality of his later music.

Schoenberg was a musical autodidact; because he did not study music formally, he was not constrained by traditional rules of composition, the “dos and don’ts” learned in music school or private study with other composers. This left him free to innovate and explore, to come up with his own solutions to musical problems as he slowly established a musical style of his own. Op. 9 reflects one of Schoenberg’s earliest moves away from traditional tonality, which is based on the triad, a three-note chord made of two stacked thirds. Instead, Schoenberg bases Op. 9’s harmonies on the interval of a fourth (to get a sense of what this sounds like, hum the opening notes of the original “Star Trek” theme). 

Just after Op. 9’s opening notes, a solo horn sounds a distinct “motto” of quickly rising fourths. This motto recurs throughout the music, batted around among the different instruments like a shuttlecock.

Structurally, the Kammersymphonie is one movement with five distinct sections played without pause. In his score, Schoenberg labels these as Exposition, Scherzo, Development, Adagio, and Reprise. Some of these sections, like the Scherzo, are so fast and so short they fly by before we realize it. “As a clarinetist, I am struck by how extreme the emotions are in this piece,” observes Matthew Griffith. “At times my part requires incredibly quiet and delicate playing, while at other times I must be ‘shrill’ and almost jazzy. There are luscious, resonant melodies next to march-like drives forward. No time is wasted dwelling on any one idea because another is just around the corner.”

© Elizabeth Schwartz