Arnold Schoenberg and the Anti-Noise Movement

Speakers): Professor Joy Calico

Schoenberg’s 1913 Scandal Concert at Vienna’s Musikverein earned its name when a fight broke out and the concert had to be stopped, resulting in multiple arrests.  The audience complained that the music was more noise than music and therefore unfit for a concert hall; Schoenberg and his circle argued that it was illegal for an audience to make that kind of noise in a concert hall.  This paper considers a notorious scandal concert within the context of the burgeoning anti-noise movement in Central Europe.
Joy H. Calico is Professor of Musicology and Director of the Max Kade Center for European and German Studies at Vanderbilt University, and incoming Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society.  She is the author of Brecht at the Opera (2008) and Arnold Schoenberg’s ‘A Survivor from Warsaw’ in Postwar Europe (2014), both from University of California Press.
 
Co-sponsored by the Department of German Studies and the Department of Music