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How did Arnold Schoenberg’s music move away from traditional tonality?

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Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg in a suit, seated at a piano and holding a conductor's baton, appears to be conducting music in a wood-paneled room. — Arnold Schoenberg Austrian-American composer Arnold Schoenberg was one of the most influential teachers of music composition of the 20th century. He also was known for his creation of new methods of musical composition involving atonality, namely serialism and the 12-tone row.

Arnold Schoenberg moved away from traditional tonality by gradually abandoning the system of central keys that had long defined Western music. Initially, his works were influenced by the complex, unresolved chromaticism of Richard Wagner, which masked but did not fully eliminate a tonal foundation.1

By 1908, Schoenberg began to abandon traditional tonality entirely, eventually creating works where no single note or chord served as a focal point. He felt that the old system of tonality was being stretched too far to remain a viable structural principle. To replace it, he developed the 12-tone method in the early 1920s. In this system, all 12 pitches of the chromatic scale are arranged into a specific sequence, or "tone row," where the notes are "related only to one another" rather than to a central tonic. This approach ensured that no hierarchy of importance was assigned to individual tones, effectively organizing atonal music through recurring patterns and chosen pitch relationships rather than traditional tension and resolution.213