Schoenberg's Interior Designs

Abstract

Abstract Familiar accounts of fin-de-siècle Vienna tend to view Arnold Schoenberg's atonal works and Adolf Loos's 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 Loos's buildings, whose denuded facades shielded plush yet refined interiors, is hard to reconcile with Schoenberg's radically dissonant and expressive music circa 1910. This divergence can be understood in terms of contrasting responses to urban modernity. While Loos's architecture facilitated a retreat inward, Schoenberg's 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 Schoenberg's music in relation to the problem of interiority in modern metropolitan life, I argue that the composer's 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 Loos's architectural efforts to protect subjectivity from needless exposure. The increasing emphasis on multidimensionality in Schoenberg's discussions of twelve-tone musical space also betrays the influence of Loos's innovations in interior space planning in the 1920s and 1930s. Harnessing the psychological and sociological aims of Loos's 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.