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Josef Matthias Hauer: “VII. Suite for Orchestra, 1st movement” (1926)

From the album Symphonic Works

The Viennese composer Josef Matthias Hauer is one of the stranger characters in 20th-classical music.  He beat Arnold Schoenberg to the discovery of twelve-tone composition by a couple of years when he published his piano piece Nomos in 1919, and he later anticipated the emergence of algorithmic thinking in music with his Zwölftonspiele (“Twelve-tone games”), in which the compositional structure is derived in a systematic way from the intervalllic structure of the “tropes” (complementary hexachords forming a complete twelve-tone pitch set).  But in spite of these would-be claims to fame, Hauer remains a marginal figure.  Even now, recordings of his music are hard to come by.

In contrast to the music of the Viennese School, which (with the partial exception of Webern’s later works) in spite of its rejection of tonality remained deeply indebted to the musical syntax of the Austro-Germanic tradition stemming from the 18th century, Hauer’s twelve-tone music is largely unmoored from conventional classical-romantic phrase structure.  Its constantly flowing, meandering melodies suggest a kinship with the Fortspinnung principle of Baroque music, in which the continual evolution of melody is paramount.  Together with the atonal harmonic language, this gives Hauer’s music a delightfully manic quality reminiscent of a  perpetuum mobile.

October 23, 2009, 4:29pm