Arnold schoenberg
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Anton Webern
„It is obvious that Webern – who emerged very early on as the chief landmark in defining our own personalities – stands at the centre of these ‚explorations’. There are innumerable commentaries on Webern, but they are only useful inasmuch as they have isolated the lines of force active at the present time: the consideration of the series as a hierarchic distribution, the importance of the interval and of intervallic proportions, the role of chromaticism and of complementary sounds, and the assembling of structures from the different characteristics of the sound phenomenon.”
In the quote above, published in his Penser la Musique Aujourd’hui in 1963, Pierre Boulez reflects on how young composers who came to maturity after World War II turned to Anton Webern as THE pivotal figure of the pre-war “avant-garde” (more than Schoenberg or Berg and certainly far more than Stravinsky or Bartók) and why they did so.
No-one could have put it more succinctly and with more justification than Boulez: “Webern, the chief landmark in defining our own personalities…”
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Anton Webern
Austrian composer and conductor (1883–1945)
Anton Webern[a] (German:[ˈantoːnˈveːbɐn]ⓘ; 3 December 1883 – 15 September 1945) was an Austrian composer, conductor, and musicologist. His music was among the most radical of its milieu in its concision and use of then novel atonal and twelve-tone techniques. His approach was typically rigorous, inspired by his studies of the Franco-Flemish School under Guido Adler and by Arnold Schoenberg's emphasis on structure in teaching composition from the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, the First Viennese School, and Johannes Brahms. Webern, Schoenberg, and their colleague Alban Berg were at the core of what became known as the Second Viennese School.
Webern was arguably the first and certainly the last of the three to write music in a style that was both expressionist and aphoristic, reflecting his instincts and the idiosyncrasy of his compositional process. He treated themes of loss, love, nature, and spirituality, working from his experiences. Unhappily peripatetic and typically assigned to conduct light
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Anton Webern
Anton Webern (3 December 1883 – 15 September 1945) was an Austrian composer and conductor. He was a member of the Second Viennese School. As a student and significant follower of Arnold Schoenberg, he became one of the best-known exponents of the twelve-tone technique; in addition, his innovations regarding schematic organization of pitch, rhythm and dynamics were formative in the musical technique later known as total serialism.
Biography
Webern was born in Vienna, Austria, as Anton Friedrich Wilhelm von Webern. He was the only surviving son of Carl von Webern, a civil servant, and Amelie (née Geer) who was a competent pianist and accomplished singer - the only obvious source of the future composer's talent.[1] He never used his middle names and dropped the von in 1918 as directed by the Austrian government's reforms after World War I. After spending much of his youth in Graz and Klagenfurt, Webern attended Vienna University from 1902. There he studied musicology with Guido Adler, writing his
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