Josef Matthias Hauer |
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John Covach |
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Austrian composer and theorist Josef Matthias
Hauer was born 19 March 1883 in Wiener Neustadt, just outside Vienna.
Hauer’s father, Matthias Hauer, worked as a prison supervisor but
was also an amateur musician. He instructed the young Josef in music as the son learned to
play the zither. Hauer was
later to write that he had learned from his father all that was essential
to know about music, and learned it between the ages of five and ten. He attended the Wiener Neustadt Teacher Training Institute
(1897-1902), earning his certificate as an elementary school teacher in
1904. Hauer graduated along
with the philosopher Ferdinand Ebner, and Hauer’s continued friendship
with Ebner had a strong impact upon the former’s musical and
intellectual development. He
taught in elementary schools in Krumbach, St. Pölten, and Wiener Neustadt
before being given medical retirement in 1919.
During World War I, Hauer was assigned office duty in Vienna; he
moved to the Austrian capital in 1915 and remained there until his death
on 22 September 1959.
While he had been active as an organist,
choral conductor, and cellist since his teenage years, Hauer’s earliest
compositions seem to date from around 1908.
Hauer's early published works, opp. 1-18 (1912-19)--which he
described retrospectively as the “first onset of my twelve-tone
music”--are mostly chromatic yet still tonal or modal, though some
passages also explore atonality in a manner loosely similar to the
contemporary music of Arnold Schoenberg and Anton von Webern. These early
pieces range from songs and piano miniatures to the dramatic Apokalyptische
Phantasie, op. 5 (1913), which is scored for chamber orchestra and his
most significant early work.
Vienna throughout the period between the
world wars was a hotbed of artistic and intellectual activity,
and during this time Hauer associated with the Schoenberg circle,
as well as with Peter Altenberg, Hermann Bahr, Karl Kraus, Adolf Loos, and
Johannes Itten. Hauer’s
most important association was with Ebner, who worked with Hauer on the
composer’s first music-theoretical work, Über die Klangfarbe,
and who later published a lengthy analysis of Hauer's op. 5.
Ebner's theology--especially as it is articulated in his Das
Wort und die geistigen Realitäten, which Hauer copied for
publication--provided an important impetus to Hauer's discovery of the
“twelve-tone law” in August 1919.
Throughout his career as a composer, Hauer thought of music as a
means to spiritual contemplation–music as a window that opens onto the
spiritual realm. But Ebner
had argued that all art falls short of such revelation, since ultimately
an artwork is only ever a reflection of the artist him or herself: the
artist mistakenly claims a spiritual I-Thou relationship for an experience
that is more accurately thought of as an I-I relationship. To a certain extent, Hauer was sympathetic to this position
inasmuch as a piece of music in the European art-music tradition can be
seen as a composer’s personal expression.
Hauer thought instead music should arise through a composer in the
most unmediated manner possible, and when he hit upon the principle of
constantly and systematically circulating all twelve notes, he believed he
had discovered the realm in which music could transcend the personal and
attain the spiritual.
His first pieces after discovering the
twelve-tone law were not strictly twelve-tone, however.
Initially, Hauer attempted to control the number of pitches that
would be circulated before the same one was reused, and his Nomos,
op. 19 (August 1919) contains sections that employ collections of 8-12
pitch classes. Exclusively
twelve-tone passages occur at important structural points, and the opening
bars employ five statements of a twelve-tone row in twelve monophonic
phrases of five notes each. Hauer
soon employed twelve-tone collections only, and his works from op. 20
forward explore a broad range of approaches to twelve-tone structure.
In the twenty-year period between 1919 and 1939, Hauer wrote over
seventy works--many of which are multi-movement pieces--including operas,
song cycles, chamber and symphonic music, and piano collections.
Schoenberg held Hauer's ideas in high regard
in the early and mid 1920s, and Hauer's music--including op. 19--was
performed in the Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen.
The two composers for a time discussed the idea of jointly
authoring a book, and even of opening a school for twelve-tone
composition. Hauer's new
ideas about the role of the composer, however, differed markedly from
those of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, who held to the traditional role of
the composer as expressive artist. Hauer
continued to argue that the composer's role was to suppress any will to
personal expression in music and to work only at expressing the spiritual
truth inherent in the twelve notes themselves; he eventually went so far
as to reject the title of composer, thinking of himself instead as an
“interpreter of the twelve tones.”
While Hauer claimed to have been the first to
compose music in full consciousness of the twelve-tone law, he is among
the most important early writers in twelve-tone music theory and
aesthetics. His Vom Wesen
des Musikalischen was first published in 1920 and in it he clearly
states that a piece should employ all twelve notes before any is sounded
again. In this work, as well
as in his Deutung des Melos (1923) and in many short articles
written during the early 1920s, Hauer argues for the superiority of atonal
over tonal music, grounding his claims by offering support drawn from
acoustics, culture, and spiritual studies.
By late 1921 he had discovered the forty-four tropes--hexachord
pairs that exhaust the twelve tones--and trope classification subsequently
became an important aspect of Hauer's understanding of atonal pitch
structure. Years before the
twelve-tone theoretical writing of Herbert Eimert, Erwin Stein, and Fritz
Heinrich Klein, Hauer had set forth the basic principles of his approach
in print. His many
theoretical writings--including detailed discussions of the tropes in
numerous musical examples appearing in his Vom Melos zur Pauke
(1925, dedicated to Schoenberg) and Zwölftontechnik (1926)--have
unfortunately led to misconceptions about his middle-period music, pieces
often characterized as mere exemplars of his trope theory.
While it is true that a number of Hauer's musical works between opp.
20 and 89 employ pairs of unordered hexachords, there are also a
significant number that employ an ordered series, and in those employing a
series there is frequently some systematic process of rotation at work as
well.
Two representative examples of Hauer’s
middle-period practice are his Opp. 25 and 54.
Inspired by the poetry on Friedrich Hölderlin, Hauer’s op. 25
(1923) is a collection of sixteen short pieces for solo piano. The first piece, “Deine Wellen umspielten mich,” is based
on a single trope–in this case the thirty-first trope. The trope appears at all twelve possible transposition
levels, the first six transpositions being based on one of the two
whole-tone scales, while the next six are based on the other.
Having employed all twelve transpositions, the piece ends at the
same transposition at which it began.
Here on a small scale one can clearly detect Hauer’s concern for
the twelve-tone law as both an principle of local structure (each trope)
and as a determinant of large-scale form (the transposition scheme).
Hauer’s Violin Concerto, Op. 54 (1928) employs an ordered
twelve-tone row as its structural point of departure.
Through a systematic procedure of rotation at both local and
long-term levels of structure, Hauer sets a lengthy process in motion that
is ultimately not completed in the course of the piece.
Yet all material for the piece is derived from the constantly
mutating row, and the tropes are not of especial importance in this case.
Throughout his music-theoretical writing,
Hauer grounds his technical discussion in his belief in the spiritual
essence of atonal music. Appealing
to the authority of Goethe's Farbenlehre, Hauer argues throughout
his Vom Wesen des Musikalischen, for instance, that atonal music
exists on a higher spiritual level than tonal music, and that the most
perfect form of atonal music employs all twelve notes in equal proportion.
He places “Melos” (pure atonal melody) above “Rhythmus”
(the rhythmic drumming on a single tone) and argues as well for music’s
superiority over language as a mode of coming to spiritual truth (another
aspect of the Hauer’s reaction to Ebner's philosophy).
Hauer's references to Goethe's scientific writing--likely under the
influence of Rudolf Steiner's interpretations--and to Chinese philosophy
throughout his theoretical work also suggest that Hauer was influenced by
the various esoteric and occult movements that had flourished in Vienna
since the late 19th century. His
argument in favor of the spiritual nature of the twelve-tones is a good
example. Hauer points out
that the twelve equal-tempered notes do not arise naturally in nature (and
here he follows Goethe’s argument that the entire color spectrum does
not exist in nature). The
equal-tempered twelve tones are instead the result of a
“spiritualization” of what nature provides–a way of rising above the
coarse material of the physical realm into the perfect realm of the
spiritual. One perceives this
more-spiritual twelve-tone music through “intuitive
hearing”–extending Arthur Schopenhauer’s musical aesthetics by way
of Steiner’s esoteric reading of Goethean science, one “hears into”
the realm of the spiritual.
Since turning to twelve-tone composition in
1919, Hauer had struggled to reject in practice what he had denounced in
theory; despite his often severe pronouncements about overcoming the
impulse to personal expression in music, he tended to remain within
conventional genres, writing concertos, string quartets, etc.
But by the end of the 1930s, Hauer moved into the final stage of
his career–one marked unmistakably by a clear and complete renunciation
of personal expression in music. After
1939 he wrote nothing but pieces he termed “Zwölftonspiele,” most of
which are identified only by the date of their completion, though a few of
these carry specific titles. Hauer
often sent completed Zwölftonspiele to friends, and it is thus impossible
to know how many of these pieces were actually composed, though it is
likely that he wrote over 1000 in the period between 1940 and his death in
1959. The Zwölftonspiel was
devoted to an objective contemplation of the twelve notes that makes few
concessions to the norms of European art music.
In constructing a Zwölftonspiel, Hauer began with a twelve-tone
row, often derived through some chance procedure.
He then used this
ordered series to arrive at a “Kontinuum”--a sequence of twelve
four-note chords in which one note changes from chord to chord.
This Kontinuum is then subjected to any number of technical
manipulations in order to bring out aspects of its twelve-tone structure.
With its almost mechanical procedures for generating a musical
surface from an underlying tone row, the Zwölftonspiel is more akin to a
meditation exercise than to a composition, and the various technical
procedures employed can be thought of as lenses through which one may
contemplate the twelve-tone universe.
In this last phase of his career, Hauer no longer wrote music that
could be considered “compositions” in any traditional sense: these
truly were twelve-tone contemplations.
One consequence of Hauer’s struggle to
renounce personal expression in his music is that his pieces do not strike
even the trained listener as particularly interesting compositions. They often seem rather plain and amateurish, lacking the
powerful expressive impulse that marks so much of the music of his
Viennese contemporaries, Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg.
And if one follows Hauer’s thinking about what these pieces are
meant to be, the answer to redressing the neglect they have suffered over
the years would not be to have them played in concert more often, since
that would only encourage an inappropriate set of expectations–those
associated with the European art-music tradition (though things are
certainly better in this regard at the beginning of this century than they
were at the beginning of the last!).
It is thus perhaps most fitting that Hauer’s music has been taken
up primarily as a musical practice in which new pieces, most often Zwölftonspiele,
are constantly produced by students seeking to enter into the world of
twelve-tone music as something like a lifestyle.
At the Josef Matthias Hauer Musikhochschule in Wiener Neustadt,
Robert Michael Weiss continues to teach Hauer’s music and theories as
did his teacher, the Viennese Hauer student Victor Sokolowski, before him. Though Hauer's historical importance is as a music theorist, he received numerous awards for his compositions during his lifetime. In addition to performances of his works in the 1920s, Hauer was awarded the Vienna Artist's prize in 1927 and from 1930 was paid a state honorarium. Ironically, Hauer's music was pronounced decadent by the National Socialists in the 1930s, and some of his scores were included in the touring exhibition of “degenerate art” at about this same time. There was renewed interest in his work in Vienna for a time after World War II, and Hauer was accorded honorary membership in the Vienna Konzerthausgesellschaft, awarded the title of professor (1954), and received the Major Austrian State Prize (1955). Principal
Works Apokalyptische
Phantasie, Op. 5 (1913), for chamber orchestra Nomos,
Op. 19 (1919), for piano Hölderlin
Lieder, Op. 21 (1922), for voice and piano Violinkonzert,
Op. 54 (1928), for piano and orchestra Der
Menschen Weg, Kantate in sieben Teilen nach Worten von Friedrich Hölderlin,
Op. 67 (1934), for four soloists, mixed choir, and orchestra Zwölftönespiel
I für Orchester (1940) Perhaps
1000 Zwölftonspiele written during 1939-59 Principal
Theoretical Writings Vom
Wesen des Musikalischen
(Leipzig and Vienna, 1920). Deutung
des Melos: Eine Frage an die Künstler und Denker unserer Zeit
(Leipzig, Vienna, and Zurich, 1923). Vom
Melos zur Pauke: Eine Einführung in die Zwölftonmusik
(Vienna, 1925). Zwölftontechnik:
Die Lehre von den Tropen (Vienna, 1926). Select
Bibliography Karl
Eschman, Changing Forms in Modern Music (Boston, 1945). Monika
Lichtenfeld, Untersuchungen zur Theorie der Zwölftontechnik bei Josef
Matthias Hauer, Ph.D.
diss. (Regensburg, 1964). Walter
Szmolyan, Josef Matthias Hauer (Vienna, 1965). Johann
Sengstschmid, Zwischen Trope und Zwölftonspiel, Forschungsbeitrage
zur Musikwissenschaft, 28 (Regensburg, 1980). Dieter
Bogner, “Josef Matthias Hauers ‘Zwölftonteppich’: Zur
geistegeschichtlichen Stellung des Komponisten,” Morgen 5/18
(1981), 273-80. Martin
Vogel, Schönberg und die Folgen, Teil 1: Schönberg (Bonn, 1984). Bryan
Simms, “Who First Composed Twelve-Tone Music, Schoenberg or Hauer?” Journal
of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 10/2 (1987), 109-33. Hans
Ulrich U. Götte, Die Kompositionstechniken Josef Matthias Hauers (Kassel,
1989). John Covach, “The Music and Theories of Josef Matthias Hauer,” Ph.D. diss. (Univ of Michigan, 1990).
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