Collection consists of materials relating mostly to Schoenberg's career at UCLA, including his University of California biography form, and letters to and from Schoenberg, his friends and UCLA colleagues, and his family. Includes miscellaneous photographs, some inscribed, of Schoenberg and others, and clippings relating to his music and career. Also contains a photocopy of the manuscript of Mailied (1899), the original of which is housed in the UCLA Dept. of Special Collections.

Arnold Franz Walter Schoenberg was born on Sept. 13, 1874 in Vienna; began composing before he was nine years old; composed the string sextet Verklärte Nacht (1899), which he later scored for string orchestra, and became one of his most popular works; Austrian composers Alban Berg and Anton Webern began studying with him in 1904; his cantata Gurrelieder (begun in 1900) was received enthusiastically at its premiere in 1913; by 1909 he began creating atonal compositions, and in his Opus 25 Piano Suite, he created the first composition based on a row or series of 12 tones; his opera Moses und Aron (begun in 1930) was based on this technique; in 1925 he was invited to direct the master class in musical composition at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin; after the rise of the Nazis, he was dismissed from his post in 1933, and emigrated to the United States via Paris; took a position at the Malkin Conservatory in Boston in November 1933, and then moved to California the following year; after a year as a lecturer at the University of Southern California (1935-36) he taught composition as UCLA from 1936 until his retirement in 1944; he became a U.S. citizen in 1944; continued to create compositions illustrating his mastery of the 12-tone method; died on July 13, 1951 in LA.

Copyright has not been assigned to the Performing Arts Special Collections. All requests for permission to publish or quote from manuscripts must be submitted in writing to the Librarian for Performing Arts Special Collections. Permission for publication is given on behalf of the Performing Arts Special Collections as the owner of the physical items and is not intended to include or imply permission of the copyright holder(s), which must also be obtained.