Schoenberg's Interior Designs
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Abstract
Abstract Familiar accounts of fin-de-siecle Vienna tend to view Arnold Schoenberg9s atonal works and Adolf Loos9s anti-ornamental polemics as expressions of similar modernist principles. But although the two friends were equally determined to challenge bourgeois standards of beauty, the calm appearance of Loos9s buildings, whose denuded facades shielded plush yet refined interiors, is hard to reconcile with Schoenberg9s radically dissonant and expressive music circa 1910. This divergence can be understood in terms of contrasting responses to urban modernity. While Loos9s architecture facilitated a retreat inward, Schoenberg9s release of unconscious impulses into the compositional process mimicked the psychological breakdown Georg Simmel believed to threaten city dwellers—a breakdown in which inner and outer realms were no longer distinguishable. Situating Schoenberg9s music in relation to the problem of interiority in modern metropolitan life, I argue that the composer9s creative aesthetics began to converge with those of Loos only later in his career. By incorporating concealment into the very fabric of twelve-tone music, Schoenberg took an “inward turn” resembling Loos9s architectural efforts to protect subjectivity from needless exposure. The increasing emphasis on multidimensionality in Schoenberg9s discussions of twelve-tone musical space also betrays the influence of Loos9s innovations in interior space planning in the 1920s and 1930s. Harnessing the psychological and sociological aims of Loos9s designs as tools of interpretation, I propose that the twelve-tone method represents a renewed commitment to privacy and interiority in the face of the externalizing impulses of urban modernity.