Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) was a Vienna-born composer who pushed late-Romantic harmony past its breaking point, first into free atonality and then, in the early 1920s, into the twelve-tone method — a systematic way of composing without a home key that reorganized twentieth-century classical music around his own strict logic. His 1912 song cycle Pierrot Lunaire, delivered in an eerie half-speech Sprechstimme rather than normal melody, became one of modernism's foundational shocks. Forced into exile by the Nazis in 1933, he spent his final years teaching in Los Angeles, where a young John Cage became one of his most unruly students.

the sound in question

1912

Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21: I. MondestrunkenArnold Schoenberg