Stephen Johnson

Breaking Free - the minds that changed music

In The Essay this week, personal reflections on the revolutionary music and ideas of the Second Viennese School as they searched for an antidote to all the certainties and expectations of the past, and cast music on a new path of dissonance and discovery, shocking audiences then and now.

Tonight's essayist is broadcaster and journalist Stephen Johnson who has chosen Schoenberg's Second String Quartet as his touchstone - a work that defines Schoenberg's movement away from traditional tonality and embraces the dissonance.