On 2 January 1911, a concert of Arnold Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 2 (1908) and Three Piano Pieces (1909) took place in Munich. In the audience was the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky. Two weeks later, Kandinsky wrote to Schoenberg saying his music was ‘exactly what I am trying to find in my paintings.’1While Schoenberg’s early works, for example Gurrelieder (1900–03), bore the legacy of his predecessors such as Mahler, Brahms, and Beethoven, the Munich programme introduced free atonality to the audience. In the classical tradition, a melody is based around a keynote known as the tonic. The composer creates sequences of harmonies also related to the tonic to accompany the melody. The broader interaction of these harmonies forms the tonality of the piece.The tonic acts as the focal point around which the harmonies flow and ebb, forming the tensions and releases of tonal music — yielding music that is conventionally pleasing to the ear.Schoenberg, however, dismantled the relationships between his harmonies, combining them in new ways to remove the tonic, detaching them from their anchoring point. This new freedom through loss of tonality (essentially, free atonality) created angular melodies and dissonant harmonies — music which seemed to Kandinsky to be composed of ‘individual voices’ each pursuing an ‘independent life’2.Kandinsky was inspired, incorporating increasingly abstract forms in his paintings to express the elusive thing he was ‘trying to find’. In Composition IV (1911), for example, he uses sharp lines, contrasting colours, and abstract (pictographic) forms to convey the emotional intensity of the Cossacks in battle.The music of Schoenberg and the paintings of Kandinsky both sought to express subjective emotions with greater freedom by breaking from the rigid conventions of the classical tradition. As such their works are key examples of the expressionist movement of the early 20th century.