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Breaking Free: The World of the Second Viennese School in 5 Objects
Coalition Chess

Schoenberg鈥檚 great musical innovation was the twelve-tone method, which abolished key signatures and represented all twelve notes in an octave scale equally. It was a system devised to contain the chaos of atonality.

Containing chaos within a logical system was a specialty of Schoenberg鈥檚, and not one restricted to musical composition.

In the 1920s, he devised the four-player game of Coalition Chess which swapped knights, rooks and pawns for machine guns, submarines and aeroplanes.

Regardless of the outcome, the game was designed to replicate the sequence of events in WWI. Chess expert Professor Ernst Strouhal views it as Schoenberg鈥檚 method of processing the tumult of WWI through the application of logic and process.

(Coalition Chess) Image (c) Belmont Music Publishers, Pacific Palisades/CA