Context

Anton Webern (1883-1945) was an Austrian composer best known for his work with atonal and serial music.

Webern began studying both piano and cello before studying musicology at the University of Vienna in 1902. By 1904 he was studying under composer Arnold Schoenberg. Together with his teacher and Alban Berg, a fellow Schoenberg student, Webern began to explore a new musical idea: Atonality. This new music, unlike almost any music before it, was written without a tonal center. It rejected the idea of a diatonic scale and chords based around it. It began to explore more subtle relationships between pitches. Though it was seemingly the rejection of all the musical ideas that came before it, it was in fact, the culmination. As music progressed, it had gotten more and more chromatic and farther from the more simple diatonicism that preceded it. The Second Viennese School, as the three composers have been dubbed, followed the lead of composers like Wagner who had been exploring the very limits of tonality before them.

As the exploration of Atonality progressed, a new way of writing this music was developed by Schoenberg and his students. In 1924, they began writing based on the 12-tone row, an ordering of all 12 pitches of the chromatic scale placed in a specific order. The 12-tone row was then expanded to include the rows for the original's inverse, retrograde (original backwards), the inverse of the retrograde, as well as transpositions of each form. The pieces composed in this serial manner use the 12-tone row and its various forms as a guide musical material. Music written this way became more and more about musical textures and timbres and exploring different sound landscapes. Webern began composing using the 12-tone method in 1925 and continued to do so for much of his remaining career.

In 1935, Webern finished his Three Songs on Texts by Hildegard Jone. The work is a set of three songs that are set to the poetry of Jone, an artist and poet of the time. Jone's words were used for all of Webern's vocal works after op. 25, something Webern decided upon first reading the poet. The three songs are quite short (no. 1 being only 12 measures) and are strictly serial works. The piece came in a time when Webern was writing exclusively using Schoenberg's 12-tone technique.

I will be analyzing the first song in the set of three.