Reassesses the position of Anton Webern in twentieth-century music. In her detailed analyses, however, Bailey demonstrates a fundamentally traditional aspect to Webern's creativity, when describing his own music. These analyses draw on sketch material made available at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel and include transcriptions of little-known drafts and sketches. A valuable aspect of the book is the inclusion in appendices of such materials as a complete explanation of the row content of each work, the correct prime form of each of the rows from Op. 20 onwards, with a matrix constructed for each, and exhaustive row analyses.

A systematic study of the early atonal works of Austrian composer, Anton Webern, from the George Lieder, op. 3, to the Latin canons, op. 16. Examining such elements as pitch, register, timbre and rhythm, Forte argues that a single compositional system underlies all of Webern's atonal music.

French-language account of Webern's life and work, consisting of a biography whose chapters are interspersed with sections, in smaller type, on the works and more general technical matters.

This book is about the way in which a society constructs an idea of nature and the role that art, and specifically music, may have in the articulation of that idea. It explores such an idea in relation to Webern, whose music has been almost exclusively portrayed as abstract and autonomous. In opposition to the exclusively formalist concerns of post-Darmstadt Webern reception, this book argues that abstraction in music is understood fully only in relation to the material, historical reality from which it abstracts, and that musical modernism is more fully understood by exposing its underground roots in the aesthetics of romanticism.

Based on the discovery of previously unknown Webern manuscripts, notebooks, and diaries, this biography of the twentieth-century composer examines all the crucial elements of his life and work, including his years as a pupil of Schoenberg.

This collection of essays looks at the music of Webern from several different perspectives. Webern scholarship, based on the sketches and other primary material now owned by the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel and the Library of Congress in Washington, has emphasised Webern's lyricism, and this is a theme running through Webern Studies. Most of the essays are the result of work with primary material. The volume includes entries from Webern's diaries, and all of the row tables for his twelve-note music. A comprehensive Webern bibliography covers thoroughly the period since Zoltan Roman's bibliography of 1978.

Following the development of the German Lied after the nineteenth century - when it was widely known as the setting of Romantic poetry to music - this book explores the changing artistic scene in the early twentieth century, as rapid social, economic and environmental changes affected German cultural production. This book considers the literary and musical ideas that both challenged and complemented each other as new directions in songwriting were developed across the modern period. With the Lieder of Alban Berg and Anton Webern, the genre arrived at a point of convergence with the ideals of German modernism. This study offers new insights into the cultural significance of German songwriting in the first part of the twentieth century.

This study provides a new view of a composer long considered to be one of the century's most rigorously intellectual creators, Anton Webern. By examining a central pre-twelve-tone work, the Trakl cycle, Op 14, in the context of the Viennese intellectual and artistic climate, Shreffler shows how Webern's responses to Trakl's complex verse enabled him to expand his musical vocabulary. The author's emphasis on Webern's compositional process is of particular importance: whether because of the anxiety of creating a new musical language, or because of an innate hyper-perfectionism (or both), Webern rejected most of what he composed. A close examination of the manuscript sources - fragments, sketches, and fair copies - of Webern's comparatively neglected middle-period lieder enables her to shed light on Webern's musical language and his working methods. A focus on the sources also helps to modify the view that his music progressed steadily in the direction of the twelve-tone technique. The works reveal instead a concern with expressing the essence of the text; this lyricism, rather than articulating a substantially different aesthetic from the later works, provides a better understanding of the consummate lyricism of all his music, however compressed or fragmented its utterance in the `classic' twelve-tone works.