Anton Webern

Anton Webern (1883–1945) was an Austrian composer and conductor whose compressed, precisely organized music helped shape postwar serialism.

Second Viennese School: A group of early twentieth-century composers centered on Arnold Schoenberg and his students in Vienna. Webern studied with Schoenberg and became one of the school’s defining composers.
Klangfarbenmelodie: A compositional idea in which a musical line is distributed among changing instrumental timbres. Webern often makes shifts of orchestral color articulate a phrase as clearly as pitch does.
Passacaglia, Op. 1: Webern’s 1908 orchestral variations on a repeating bass pattern, composed as his Op. 1. Its late-Romantic scale shows the style from which Webern’s later compression developed.
Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music: A postwar German summer school that became a major meeting place for contemporary composers. At Darmstadt, Webern’s music became a model for composers seeking rigorous new methods.
Arnold Schoenberg: An Austrian composer who developed atonality and the twelve-tone method. Schoenberg taught Webern and introduced the compositional method Webern transformed.
Tone row: An ordered sequence of pitches used as the basis for a twelve-tone composition. Its transformations supply recurring pitch relationships in Webern’s serial works.
Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 10: A set of five brief orchestral miniatures composed by Webern in 1911–13. Their sparse textures and changing instrumental colors make brevity a central expressive feature.
Olivier Messiaen: A French composer and teacher whose postwar rhythmic and pitch experiments influenced younger composers. Messiaen taught at Darmstadt, where his students encountered Webern as a modernist precedent.
Atonality: Music that lacks a tonal center governing its pitches and harmonies. Webern’s mature works often abandon the tonal hierarchy inherited from earlier music.
Musical pointillism: A texture of isolated musical events separated by silence or contrasting gestures. Many Webern works distribute brief notes across instruments rather than sustain continuous lines.

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