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The Second Viennese School is the term generally used in English-speaking countries to denote the group of composers that comprised Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils and close associates in early 20th century Vienna, where, with breaks, he lived and taught between 1903 and 1925. Their music was initially characterized by post-romantic expanded tonality and later, following Schoenberg’s own evolution, a totally-chromatic expressionism without firm tonal centre (often referred to as atonality) and later still Schoenberg’s serial twelve-note technique. This although Schoenberg's teaching (as his various published textbooks demonstrate) was highly traditional and conservative, and did not include discussion of his serial method.

The principal members of the school, besides Schoenberg, were Alban Berg and Anton Webern, who were among his first pupils. Other pupils of this generation included Heinrich Jalowetz, Erwin Stein and Egon Wellesz, and somewhat later Eduard Steuermann, Hanns Eisler, Karl Rankl, Josef Rufer and Viktor Ullmann. Not all of them adopted serial technique, or waited for a considerable time before doing so. Schoenberg’s brother-in-law Alexander Zemlinsky is sometimes included as part of the Second Viennese School, though he was never Schoenberg’s pupil and never renounced a traditional conception of tonality. Several yet later pupils, such as Winfried Zillig, the Catalan Roberto Gerhard, the Transylvanian Norbert von Hannenheim and the Greek Nikolaos Skalkottas, are sometimes covered by the term, though (apart from Gerhard) they never studied in Vienna but as part of Schoenberg’s masterclass in Berlin. German musical literature refers to the grouping as the ‘Wiener Schule’ or ‘Neue Wiener Schule’. The existence of a 'First Viennese School' is debatable. The term is often assumed to connote the great trinity of Vienna-based composers working in the late 18th and early 19th century, particularly Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Joseph Haydn, Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert, but Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert were never Haydn’s pupils in the sense that Berg and Webern’s were Schoenberg’s pupils.

• 20th century classical composers
• Modernist composers