This week we started by reading and learning about Arnold Schoenberg a musician who pushed the boundaries and experimented in new ways to create new music. He is known for having first pioneered free atonality which is music without a specific tone that is the guide, and also for music known as “serialism”. Serialism is associated with Twelve-Tone music in which the music is based on orderings of the twelve pitch classes. Another way of explaining would be that twelve notes are used in any order but can’t be used again until all of the notes have been used once through, this can allow for endless combinations of notes or also can be ordered in a series or tone row. Then we started to get into Schoenberg’s works on the Bible and some of his biblical pieces based on stories of the Bible. Schoenberg works on the Bible always gave a distinctive and different interpretation that allowed from new perspectives to be had. A few of his works were his oratorio Jakobsleiter and his opera Moses und Aron. Jakobsleiter is about how modern human beings wrestled with God and spirituality and through all the bad and being an atheist they still have a tiny bit of faith in them that eventually leads them to God and religion. His work Moses und Aron is more of about how the his musical journey parallels with that of the story of Moses and Aron. Although in the end this work was never completed that uncompletedness represented the unresolved conflicts found in the Bible. Schoenberg opened up a new realm of possibilities in the musical world in which he did not conform to what was already in place but created new musical possibilities and new boundaries in the world of music at the time, while also having new interpretations and perspectives on some of the biblical stories.