Twelve-tone technique in the context of "Josef Matthias Hauer"

Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, performing arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and social issues were all aspects of this movement. Modernism centered around beliefs in a "growing alienation" from prevailing "morality, optimism, and convention" and a desire to change how "human beings in a society interact and live together".

The modernist movement emerged during the late 19th century in response to significant changes in Western culture, including secularization and the growing influence of science. It is characterized by a self-conscious rejection of tradition and the search for newer means of cultural expression. Modernism was influenced by widespread technological innovation, industrialization, and urbanization, as well as the cultural and geopolitical shifts that occurred after World War I. Artistic movements and techniques associated with modernism include abstract art, literary stream-of-consciousness, cinematic montage, musical atonality and twelve-tonality, modern dance, modernist architecture, and urban planning.

Atonality in its broadest sense is music that lacks a tonal center, or key. Atonality, in this sense, usually describes compositions written from about the early 20th century to the present day, where a hierarchy of harmonies focusing on a single, central triad is not used, and the notes of the chromatic scale function independently of one another. More narrowly, the term atonality describes music that does not conform to the system of tonal hierarchies that characterized European classical music between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. "The repertory of atonal music is characterized by the occurrence of pitches in novel combinations, as well as by the occurrence of familiar pitch combinations in unfamiliar environments".

The term is also occasionally used to describe music that is neither tonal nor serial, especially the pre-twelve-tone music of the Second Viennese School, principally Alban Berg, Arnold Schoenberg, and Anton Webern. However, "as a categorical label, 'atonal' generally means only that the piece is in the Western tradition and is not 'tonal'", although there are longer periods, e.g., medieval, renaissance, and modern modal music to which this definition does not apply. "Serialism arose partly as a means of organizing more coherently the relations used in the pre-serial 'free atonal' music. ... Thus, many useful and crucial insights about even strictly serial music depend only on such basic atonal theory".

Alban Maria Johannes Berg (/bɛərɡ/ BAIRG; Austrian German: [ˈalbaːn ˈbɛrg]; 9 February 1885 – 24 December 1935) was an Austrian composer of the Second Viennese School. His compositional style combined Romantic lyricism with the twelve-tone technique. Although he left a relatively small oeuvre, he is remembered as one of the most important composers of the 20th century for his expressive style encompassing "entire worlds of emotion and structure".

Berg was born and lived in Vienna. He began to compose at the age of fifteen. He studied counterpoint, music theory and harmony with Arnold Schoenberg between 1904 and 1911, and adopted his principles of developing variation and the twelve-tone technique. Berg's major works include the operas Wozzeck (1924) and Lulu (1935, finished posthumously), the chamber pieces Lyric Suite and Chamber Concerto, as well as a Violin Concerto. He also composed a number of songs (lieder). He is said to have brought more "human values" to the twelve-tone system; his works are seen as more "emotional" than those of Schoenberg. His music had a surface glamour that won him admirers when Schoenberg himself had few.

The Second Viennese School (German: Zweite Wiener Schule, Neue Wiener Schule) was a group of composers that comprised Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils, particularly Alban Berg and Anton Webern, and close associates in early 20th-century Vienna. Their music was initially characterized by late-Romantic expanded tonality and later, a totally chromatic expressionism without a firm tonal centre, often referred to as atonality; and later still, Schoenberg's serial twelve-tone technique. Using this technique when composing, Schoenberg employed all 12 tones present in Western music's chromatic scale when forming a melody, this melody being the "prime series". This method would later be enhanced in compositions by Schoenberg and his followers through permutations such as "retrogrades", "inversions", "transformations" etc. Later, composers such as Pierre Boulez drew influence from Schoenberg's technique in furthering serialization; serializing not only pitch but rhythm, articulation, and dynamics as well. Theodor Adorno said that the twelve-tone method, when it had evolved into maturity, was a "veritable message in a bottle", addressed to an unknown and uncertain future. Though this common development took place, it neither followed a common time-line nor a cooperative path. Likewise, it was not a direct result of Schoenberg's teaching—which, as his various published textbooks demonstrate, was highly traditional and conservative. Schoenberg's textbooks also reveal that the Second Viennese School spawned not from the development of his serial method, but rather from the influence of his creative example.

Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg (13 September 1874 – 13 July 1951) was an Austrian and American composer, music theorist, teacher and writer. He was among the first modernists who transformed the practice of harmony in 20th-century classical music, and a central element of his music was its use of motives as a means of coherence. He propounded concepts like developing variation, the emancipation of the dissonance, and the "unity of musical space".

Schoenberg's early works, like Verklärte Nacht (1899), represented a Brahmsian–Wagnerian synthesis on which he built. Mentoring Anton Webern and Alban Berg, he became the central figure of the Second Viennese School. They consorted with visual artists, published in Der Blaue Reiter, and wrote atonal, expressionist music, attracting fame and stirring debate. In his String Quartet No. 2 (1907–1908), Erwartung (1909), and Pierrot lunaire (1912), Schoenberg visited extremes of emotion; in self-portraits he emphasized his intense gaze. While working on Die Jakobsleiter (from 1914) and Moses und Aron (from 1923), Schoenberg confronted popular antisemitism by returning to Judaism and substantially developed his twelve-tone technique. He systematically interrelated all notes of the chromatic scale in his twelve-tone music, often exploiting combinatorial hexachords and sometimes admitting tonal elements.

In music, serialism is a method of composition using series of pitches, rhythms, dynamics, timbres or other musical elements. Serialism began primarily with Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, though some of his contemporaries were also working to establish serialism as a form of post-tonal thinking. Twelve-tone technique orders the twelve notes of the chromatic scale, forming a row or series and providing a unifying basis for a composition's melody, harmony, structural progressions, and variations. Other types of serialism also work with sets, collections of objects, but not necessarily with fixed-order series, and extend the technique to other musical dimensions (often called "parameters"), such as duration, dynamics, and timbre.

The idea of serialism is also applied in various ways in the visual arts, design, and architecture, and the musical concept has also been adapted in literature.

Anton Webern (German: [ˈantoːn ˈveːbɐn] ; 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 lyrical, poetic 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 an aphoristic and expressionist style, reflecting his instincts and the idiosyncrasy of his compositional process. He treated themes of loss, love, nature, and spirituality, working from personal experiences. Unhappily peripatetic and often assigned light music or operetta in his early conducting career, he aspired to conduct what was seen as more respectable, serious music at home in Vienna. Following Schoenberg's guidance, Webern attempted to write music of greater length during and after their World War I service, relying on the structural support of texts in many Lieder.