Le celebri "lezioni americane" di Schönberg rappresentano un caposaldo nella produzione teorica del padre della dodecafonia, e uno dei risultati più maturi di un'attività didattica che avrà una portata determinante per le sorti della musica contemporanea. L'opera fornisce le basi metodologiche per lo studio dell'evoluzione dellinguaggio armonico, seguendo lo sviluppo dallo stabilizzarsi del principio tonale alla dissoluzione.
Noted Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg abandoned tradition and developed the twelve-tone system for music.
Associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, he led the second Viennese school. He used the spelling Schönberg until his move to the United States in 1934, whereupon he altered it to Schoenberg "in deference to American practice."
His approach in terms of harmony developed among the major landmarks of 20th-century thought; at least three generations in the Europeans and Americans consciously extended his thinking or in some cases passionately reacted in opposition. During the rise of the Nazi party, people labeled jazz as degenerate art.
People widely knew Schoenberg early in his career for his success in simultaneously extending the opposed German romantic styles of Johannes Brahms and Richard Wagner. Later, his name came to personify pioneering innovations, the most polemical feature of 20th-century art. In the 1920s, the technique, a widely influential method of Schoenberg, manipulated an ordered series of all in the chromatic scale. He also coined the term variation, and this first modern embraced ways of motifs without resorting to the dominance of a centralized melodic idea.