The New Music—Schoenberg and the Twelve-Tone Technique
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) carried out, during the 1920s, the transition from “free atonality” to the twelve-tone technique—a strictly rational compositional system that treats all twelve tones of the chromatic scale as equal.
The systematic basic idea: The twelve-tone technique was an attempt to find a new ordering principle after the “end of tonality.” Traditional harmonic theory—with its tensions and resolutions, its cadences and modulations—had exhausted itself. Schoenberg sought a new rationality that did not depend on the hierarchy of keys.
The parallel to Hegel: Schoenberg’s compositional technique was at once construction and expression. The row—the basic row of twelve tones—determines the entire work, but it does not determine it mechanically. The composer develops the row, varies it, inverts it, mirrors it—unfolding its possibilities. This dialectical structure—the unity of freedom and necessity—is Hegelian, even though Schoenberg himself was no Hegelian.
Adorno’s interpretation: Theodor W. Adorno, himself a composer and student of Schoenberg, interpreted the New Music as an expression of the social situation. Dissonance that is no longer resolved is truth—it mirrors a society that is no longer harmonious. The twelve-tone technique is a “rationalization of the irrational”—an attempt to give form to chaos without minimizing it.