SERIAL MUSIC IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE 20th CENTURY

Anton Webern ( 1883 - 1945 )

     Austrian composer Anton Webern who was a student of Schoenberg from 1905, became best-known exponents of twelve tone technique. Additionally, his innovations regarding schematic organization of pitch, rhythm and dynamics were formative in the musical technique later known as total serialism. Also, like Schoenberg's third movement of Five Pieces for Orchestra ( Op.16 ), Farben he also add many developments to another Schoenberg idea Klangfarbenmelodie. ( such as his orchestration to Bach's first Ricercar from Musical Offering. Webern, mainly focused on atonal music by using twelve tone technique, even he set and ordered the other patterns of music after 1930's.Webern's works changed significantly with his adoption of 12-note technique after that period, most aspects of composition that had interested him from the time of the early aphoristic pieces continued to occupy him; thus many features of his style remained much the same. Two features of his early music that might be singled out as particularly characteristic also of his later style are his special fondness for the interval of a semitone, together with its inversion and the various octave expansions of both, and his pointillistic scoring, with its resultant kaleidoscopic textures. When writing with a 12-note row, a dominance of semitones could be assured by building them into the row. The most  organized example is the row for the Trio op.20, which consists of six semitones separated by larger intervals: the 48 row forms divide into two groups, in each of which all rows contain the same six semitones.