ABSTRACT
In avant-garde circles – using the word in its militant and therefore exclusive sense – it is maintained with rare unanimity that “contemporary” music begins with Anton Webern. The predominance of his interest in the tectonic aspect of tonal organization and his predilection for schemes of exact symmetry, produced in Webern’s music configurations that are like crystalline structures, an intellectual beauty unsurpassed even in the more daring contrapuntal music of J. S. Bach himself. Writing essentially more geometric than that of Webern presupposes a rigorously quantitative, indeed commensurable element. As such, this makes Webern’s operations like the logical demonstration of a theorem. Schoenberg and Anton Webern, in their different ways, applied serial methods to the tonal parameter that is exclusively to the relationships between pitches. In Webern’s own work there is no trace of a “temporal series”, although it is evident that note-values, durations, already have for him a new, unmistakeably structural meaning.
