In music, a pensato (Italian: "thought") is a composed imaginary note, a written note which is neither played nor heard. "This meant that a note had to be so indescribably tender and soft that it was only allowed to be thought of." (Score 1958)
Anton Webern is credited by some with the first use of pensatos, while others argue he did not use them at all. As Alex Ross (2007: 69, quoted in Toop 2016: 158) puts it: "The Joke went around that Webern had introduced the marking pensato: Don't play the note, only think it." George Perle (1990: [pageneeded]), noting that "no composer has ever been more concrete, explicit, detailed, and subtle in his notation," argues that if Webern did use a pensato, it would have been a pitch "with all the attributes that give a note actuality: pitch, duration, mode of attack and release, timbre, intensity," and not a pitch class. He also points to a "verifiable pensato" in the last bar of Alban Berg's Lyric Suite: "The instruments drop out one by one, the four parts converging into a single line that continues into an ostinato on the last two notes of the derived series and becomes inaudible on the penultimate note of the series, seemingly continuing into the silence beyond." (Perle, 1985: 14) The last measure of the score is marked "dimin.", then "morendo...*", then the asterisk reads: "*)bis zum völligen Verlöschen, daher die letzte Terz Des—F eventuell noch ein-, zweimal wiederholen. Keinesfalls aber auf Des schließen!" ("until completely extinguished, repeat the last third of Des — F once or twice. In no case, however, conclude to Des!") Presumably an expression of unrequited love (Santos 2014: 35).
Alban Maria Johannes Berg was an Austrian composer of the Second Viennese School. His compositional style combined Romantic lyricism with the twelve-tone technique. Although he left a relatively small oeuvre, he is remembered as one of the most important composers of the 20th century for his expressive style encompassing "entire worlds of emotion and structure".
In music, a tone row or note row, also series or set, is a non-repetitive ordering of a set of pitch-classes, typically of the twelve notes in musical set theory of the chromatic scale, though both larger and smaller sets are sometimes found.
Atonality in its broadest sense is music that lacks a tonal center, or key. Atonality, in this sense, usually describes compositions written from about the early 20th-century to the present day, where a hierarchy of harmonies focusing on a single, central triad is not used, and the notes of the chromatic scale function independently of one another. More narrowly, the term atonality describes music that does not conform to the system of tonal hierarchies that characterized European classical music between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. "The repertory of atonal music is characterized by the occurrence of pitches in novel combinations, as well as by the occurrence of familiar pitch combinations in unfamiliar environments".
Anton Friedrich Wilhelm von Webern, better known as Anton Webern, was an Austrian composer and conductor whose music was among the most radical of its milieu in its sheer concision, even aphorism, and steadfast embrace of then novel atonal and twelve-tone techniques. With his mentor Arnold Schoenberg and his colleague Alban Berg, Webern was at the core of those within the broader circle of the Second Viennese School.
Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg was an Austrian-American composer, music theorist, teacher, writer, and painter. He is widely considered one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School. As a Jewish composer, Schoenberg was targeted by the Nazi Party, which labeled his works as degenerate music and forbade them from being published. He emigrated to the United States in 1933, becoming an American citizen in 1941.
The Second Viennese School was the group of composers that comprised Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils, particularly Alban Berg and Anton Webern, and close associates in early 20th-century Vienna. Their music was initially characterized by late-Romantic expanded tonality and later, a totally chromatic expressionism without firm tonal centre, often referred to as atonality; and later still, Schoenberg's serial twelve-tone technique. Adorno said that the twelve-tone method, when it had evolved into maturity, was a "veritable message in a bottle", addressed to an unknown and uncertain future. Though this common development took place, it neither followed a common time-line nor a cooperative path. Likewise, it was not a direct result of Schoenberg's teaching—which, as his various published textbooks demonstrate, was highly traditional and conservative. Schoenberg's textbooks also reveal that the Second Viennese School spawned not from the development of his serial method, but rather from the influence of his creative example.
In music, serialism is a method of composition using series of pitches, rhythms, dynamics, timbres or other musical elements. Serialism began primarily with Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, though some of his contemporaries were also working to establish serialism as a form of post-tonal thinking. Twelve-tone technique orders the twelve notes of the chromatic scale, forming a row or series and providing a unifying basis for a composition's melody, harmony, structural progressions, and variations. Other types of serialism also work with sets, collections of objects, but not necessarily with fixed-order series, and extend the technique to other musical dimensions, such as duration, dynamics, and timbre.
Lulu is an opera in three acts by Alban Berg. Berg adapted the libretto from Frank Wedekind's two Lulu plays, Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora.
The twelve-tone technique—also known as dodecaphony, twelve-tone serialism, and twelve-note composition—is a method of musical composition first devised by Austrian composer Josef Matthias Hauer, who published his "law of the twelve tones" in 1919. In 1923, Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) developed his own, better-known version of 12-tone technique, which became associated with the "Second Viennese School" composers, who were the primary users of the technique in the first decades of its existence. The technique is a means of ensuring that all 12 notes of the chromatic scale are sounded as often as one another in a piece of music while preventing the emphasis of any one note through the use of tone rows, orderings of the 12 pitch classes. All 12 notes are thus given more or less equal importance, and the music avoids being in a key. Over time, the technique increased greatly in popularity and eventually became widely influential on 20th-century composers. Many important composers who had originally not subscribed to or actively opposed the technique, such as Aaron Copland and Igor Stravinsky, eventually adopted it in their music.
Alban Berg's Violin Concerto was written in 1935. It is probably Berg's best-known and most frequently performed instrumental piece, in which the composer sought to reconcile diatonicism and dodecaphony. The work was commissioned by Louis Krasner, and dedicated by Berg to "the memory of an angel", Manon Gropius. It was the last work that Berg completed. Krasner performed the solo part in the premiere at the Palau de la Música Catalana, Barcelona, on 19 April 1936, after the composer's death.
Wozzeck is the first opera by the Austrian composer Alban Berg. It was composed between 1914 and 1922 and first performed in 1925. The opera is based on the drama Woyzeck, which the German playwright Georg Büchner left incomplete at his death. Berg attended the first production in Vienna of Büchner's play on 5 May 1914, and knew at once that he wanted to base an opera on it. From the fragments of unordered scenes left by Büchner, Berg selected 15 to form a compact structure of three acts with five scenes each. He adapted the libretto himself, retaining "the essential character of the play, with its many short scenes, its abrupt and sometimes brutal language, and its stark, if haunted, realism..."
George Perle was an American composer and music theorist. As a composer, his music was largely atonal, using methods similar to the twelve-tone technique of the Second Viennese School. This serialist style, and atonality in general, was the subject of much of his theoretical writings. His 1962 book, Serial Composition and Atonality: An Introduction to the Music of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern remains a standard text for 20th-century classical music theory. Among Perle's awards was the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Music for his Wind Quintet No. 4.
In music, a permutation (order) of a set is any ordering of the elements of that set. A specific arrangement of a set of discrete entities, or parameters, such as pitch, dynamics, or timbre. Different permutations may be related by transformation, through the application of zero or more operations, such as transposition, inversion, retrogradation, circular permutation, or multiplicative operations. These may produce reorderings of the members of the set, or may simply map the set onto itself.
In music, an interval cycle is a collection of pitch classes created from a sequence of the same interval class. In other words, a collection of pitches by starting with a certain note and going up by a certain interval until the original note is reached. In other words, interval cycles "unfold a single recurrent interval in a series that closes with a return to the initial pitch class". See: wikt:cycle.
The Lyric Suite is a six-movement work for string quartet written by Alban Berg between 1925 and 1926 using methods derived from Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique. Though publicly dedicated to Alexander von Zemlinsky, the work has been shown to possess a "secret dedication" and to outline a "secret programme".
The String Quartet, Op. 3, by Alban Berg was composed in 1910. It was not published until 1920.
Bethany Beardslee is an American soprano particularly noted for her collaborations with major 20th-century composers, such as Igor Stravinsky, Milton Babbitt, Pierre Boulez, George Perle, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and her performances of great contemporary classical music by Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern. Her legacy amongst midcentury composers was as a "composer's singer"—for her commitment to the highest art of new music. Milton Babbitt said of her "She manages to learn music no one else in the world can. She can work, work, work." In a 1961 interview for Newsweek, Beardslee flaunted her unflinching repertoire and disdain for commercialism: "I don't think in terms of the public... Music is for the musicians. If the public wants to come along and study it, fine. I don't go and try to tell a scientist his business because I don't know anything about it. Music is just the same way. Music is not entertainment."
Alban Berg composed his Three Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6, between 1913 and 1915. They are dedicated to his teacher Arnold Schoenberg. A revised version of the score was published in 1929 by Universal Edition. While the composer conducted a first performance of only the first two movements in 1923, the complete work was premiered in the revised version in Oldenburg in 1930, conducted by Johannes Schüler.
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