Together with Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg, with whom he formed the Second Viennese School, Webern laid the foundation for a large part of 20th-century music. Yet, he did so in a completely unique way. Whereas Berg was still largely influenced by the Romantic Period, and Schoenberg was a true expressionist, Webern took a more adventurous path. Of course, his music was just as atonal as the music of his peers, but he turned away from the classical-romantic tradition in many more ways.

Generally, his pieces are short works written for small ensembles. Above all, his works sound empty. Webern became a man of miniatures, of which his Variations for piano op. 27 are his best-known examples. Moreover, in his rigid music he is strongly influenced by medieval music, preceding composers such as Arvo Pärt. However, Webern's music is not as warm as Pärt's music, but colder and more distant. Webern creates a truly unique and new musical universe, which is why his is music is still exciting today.

Alfred Schnittke was the son to German-Jewish father and Volga-German mother from Frankfurt am Main. His musical education started in 1946 in Vienna, where his father worked as a journalist and translator, and from 1948 he continued his studies in Moscow. From the 1970s, he would fully dedicate himself to composing. Schnittke's style was initially avant garde, strongly influenced by the Western composition techniques such as serialism and aleatorism. Like so many of his generation, Schnittke found these techniques to be unsatisfactory, and so he created his own style which he called polystylism, inspired by Charles Ives, Luciano Berio and Bernd Alois Zimmermann, but also Gustav Mahler,It is characterised by the parodic combinations of styles from different periods, by some recognised as postmodernism.

Arnold Schoenberg was one of the most influential composers of the 20th century, but perhaps also one of the least listened to. Strikingly, Schoenberg was self-educated, even though his music is imbedded in complex music theory. It was Schoenberg who definitely departed from tonality and he developed the twelve tone technique. In this composition style, one has to use every twelve tones of the scale, before one can be repeated. The struggle to adhere to this dogma is clearly audible: his music is tense, hectic and particularly acute - and therefore at times not that accesible to occasional listeners.

Nevertheless, his music and his liberation of tonality had an enormous impact on all composers that came after him. Together with the music of his students Alban Berg and Anton Webern, his style is often referred to as the Second Viennese School, parallel to the First Viennese School of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven, who, in a similar vein, changed the history of music for good.

His most performed works are his string sextet Verklärte Nacht, his five Orchestra pieces op. 16, and his opera Moses und Aron. The development of Schoenberg's music can be heard in his Five String Quartets in particular.