How does Pierrot Lunaire use Sprechstimme?

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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.

In Pierrot Lunaire (1912), Arnold Schoenberg employs Sprechstimme—a German term meaning "speech-voice"—as a vocal technique that bridges the gap between speaking and singing.1

In this work, the performer does not sing in a traditional sense; instead, the tone quality of speech is heightened and lowered in pitch according to specific melodic contours provided in the musical notation. While Schoenberg is famously associated with popularizing this technique, it is important to note that he was not the first to use it; the style appeared earlier in Engelbert Humperdinck’s 1897 melodrama, Königskinder.1