Man Ray · CC BY-SA 2.0

Broke tonality itself, developing the twelve-tone technique that organized a composition around a fixed sequence of all twelve chromatic notes rather than a home key — a method meant to replace what he saw as an exhausted tonal system, and one that shaped a century of classical and film music after him. He taught Alban Berg and Anton Webern in Vienna as the core of what became known as the Second Viennese School. Facing Nazi Germany's civil-service restrictions on Jews, he resigned his Berlin academy post in 1933, publicly reaffirmed his Judaism, and emigrated to teach at UCLA.