Title: “Noise and Schoenberg’s 1913 Scandal Concert”

Description: On 31 March 1913 Arnold Schoenberg conducted a concert in the Great Hall of Vienna’s Musikverein that would become known as that city’s most notorious scandal concert.  The event was broken up by a melee, charges were filed, and the subsequent court proceedings were reported in the press. This paper analyzes the ways in which both the scandal and Schoenberg’s response to it sit at the nexus of fin-de-siecle anxieties about Central European concert life, the anti-noise movement, and emerging copyright law.

Brief Bio: Joy H. Calico is Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Musicology at Vanderbilt University.  She is the author of two monographs, Brecht at the Opera (2008), and Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe (2014), both from University of California Press, and is currently writing a book about opera since Salome.  She is co-founder of the Music and Sound Studies Network of the German Studies Association, and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society.  Her work has been supported by grants from the ACLS, the American Academy in Berlin, the Berlin Program, the DAAD, the Howard Foundation, the NEH, and the Sacher Stiftung.

"[This is a] famous caricature of the scandal concert...  It was originally published in Die Zeit on 6 April 1913." (Calico)