The music and theories of Josef Matthias Hauer.

Abstract

This dissertation provides an overview of the music and theories of the Austrian musician Josef Matthias Hauer. Hauer was among the first to develop a system of twelve-tone composition. Hauer based his technical practices upon his own idiosyncratic aesthetics of atonal music, and an attempt is made in this study to read Hauer's theories in the context of the intellectual climate of early twentieth-century Vienna. Hauer's aesthetic position led him to develop a theory of tone color which is founded on the use of equal-tempered tuning. But Hauer's notion of tone-color differs significantly from Schoenberg's: for Hauer tone-color is not timbre, but rather a musical gesture created by the intervals. The development of Hauer's aesthetic ideas was influenced directly by the Austrian philosopher Ferdinand Ebner; Ebner and Hauer were in close contact for a number of years. Hauer also quotes Goethe's Farbenlehre in his theoretical writing, and his position with regard to intuitive hearing strongly parallels Rudolf Steiner's interpretation of Goethe's super-sensory seeing. Hauer's music is analyzed within the context of his aesthetic and theoretical positions. It is clear that these positions led him to the twelve-tone system initially, and that they also directed his development of that system. Hauer's development of his version of the twelve-tone system contains some interesting and significant technical achievements. While differing in many ways from Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technical procedure, Hauer's procedures at times anticipate later developments in American and European serialism of the 1950's and 60's. His late Zwolftonspiele are viewed as the furthest refinement of his technical procedures; in these pieces Hauer achieves a contemplation of the Melos, and in this regard he finds himself at his furthest remove from the traditional Western concept of musical composition as personal expression.