What are the key features of expressionist music?

Expressionist music is best identified as part of the modernist movement, which encompassed all the arts, as it shares many of modernism's key characteristics. Arnold Schoenberg is the most famous composer associated with expressionism, and his group of fellow composers and students were known as the Second Viennese school. Like modernists in all the arts, these composers all wanted to get away from the traditional ideas of beauty in their music, specifically moving away from music which we would identify as Romantic.They achieved this by composing music whose key characteristics involved really dissonant harmonies, so much so that it is often very difficult to work out what key their pieces are in. This sort of composing was subsequently labelled 'atonal': music which lacks a key or a tonal centre. This is the key characteristic to remember with expressionist music, and its easy to recognise as its the sort of music which doesn't sound very good to listen to! However, the expressionist composers also included lots of other important musical characteristics in their works, including the utilisation of extreme contrasts in both dynamics and the pitch range of their instruments. Also look out for angular leaps in the melody of expressionist pieces, and a texture that frequently changes throughout the work. Finally, the composers associated with expressionism developed an almost scientific method of composing called 'twelve-tone composition'. This is one of the most famous examples of an expressionist or atonal compositional technique, and is certainly worth looking at further if you want to use a specific example of such a technique in an exam essay or one of your own compositions.