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Stefan Wolpe: Suite im Hexachord. Second movement, “Pastorale” (1936)

From the album Music for Any Instruments

Stefan Wolpe (1902-1972) is a lamentably under-appreciated German composer who throughout his creative life sought to synthesize the most advanced strains of European musical modernism with other, more popular elements, whether political songs, Middle Eastern traditional music, or Afro-American jazz.

In the 20s Wolpe encountered Ferruccio Busoni and H. H. Stuckenschmidt, and spent some time at the Bauhaus, where he was deeply influenced by the school’s utopian and inter-media aesthetics.  In 1933 Wolpe studied with Anton Webern, whose highly analytic approach to twelve-tone composition is reflected in much of Wolpe’s later work.  After emigrating to the U.S. in 1938, Wolpe took a series of teaching positions in the eastern part of the country, including Director of Music at Black Mountain College from 1952 to 1956.  He remained in the U.S. for the rest of his life.

Suite im Hexachord, written for oboe and clarinet, is a fine example of Wolpe’s ability to infuse the supposedly severe and “intellectual” method of twelve-tone composition with playfulness and lyricism.

January 04, 2010, 10:23am

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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

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David Shire: “Main Title”

From the soundtrack to The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)

I believe I first stumbled upon this music through my still-ongoing quest for examples of twelve-tone jazz.  (Recommendations, anyone?)  Though the idiom here is much closer to funk than jazz— it was the 70s, after all— the fusion is nonetheless delightful.

The topicality of this post is purely coincidental.

July 01, 2009, 2:33pm