Master Thesis

By way of intro­duc­tion, the first sec­tion of this work will involve a brief descrip­tion of the the­o­ry Neu­mann used to com­pose his cycle Op. 102 for bari­tone, sopra­no and piano. This the­o­ry, large­ly unknown out­side of the Ger­man-speak­ing world is for­mal­ly called the “Klan­grei­hen — Kom­po­si­tion­slehre der drit­ten Wiener Kom­po­si­tion­ss­chule”, trans­lat­ed in this work as “Steinbauer’s tone-row com­po­si­tion­al method”.This method of com­po­si­tion is a syn­the­sis of var­i­ous mod­ern con­sid­er­a­tions devel­oped over the last hun­dred years based on the divi­sion of the octave into 12 tones sep­a­rat­ed from each oth­er by half steps instead of divid­ed into scales of sev­en tones sep­a­rat­ed by dif­fer­ent inter­vals. It began, in this form, not with the well-known work of Arnold Schoen­berg, but sev­er­al years ear­li­er (cir­ca 1913) with the work of Josef Matthias Hauer (1883−1959), an Aus­tri­an musi­cian, com­pos­er and music the­o­rist. Though both men began with the same basic ideas, they devel­oped them in dra­mat­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent direc­tions.

Hauer, hav­ing doc­u­ment­ed his ideas very rarely and being a mere pri­ma­ry school teacher, was nev­er tru­ly rec­og­nized for his work next to Schoen­berg, a pro­lif­ic and well-known pro­fes­sor of com­po­si­tion. Hauer is not, how­ev­er, the founder of this “Third Vien­nese School”; that title belongs to Oth­mar Stein­bauer, a man even less well-known than Hauer Stein­bauer, hav­ing stud­ied with Schoen­berg in Berlin, aban­doned Schoenberg’s musi­cal ideals and style of com­po­si­tion com­plete­ly in 1928 and turned to Hauer, with whom he devel­oped a close friend­ship in Vien­na.

From 1930 until his death in 1962, Stein­bauer worked on a com­po­si­tion­al the­o­ry that began from very sim­i­lar prin­ci­ples as those of Hauer, though their com­po­si­tion­al paths also end­ed up going in very dif­fer­ent direc­tions from one anoth­er. Stein­bauer died before pub­lish­ing his work, and so his ideas remained unknown to the pub­lic with the excep­tion of his com­po­si­tion stu­dents until one of them, Hel­mut Neu­mann (b.1938), com­plet­ed and pub­lished them for the first time in 2002. Arnold Schoen­berg attempt­ed to break free from tonal ideas of dis­so­nance and con­so­nance- in effect to free com­po­si­tion from the rules of tonal­i­ty which he believed were the result of hun­dreds of years of aur­al con­di­tion­ing. He did so in his so-called “12-tone tech­nique” of seri­al­ism. Hauer and Stein­bauer, in con­trast, believed in the need for strict rules in com­po­si­tion but also in a fun­da­men­tal, human recog­ni­tion of con­so­nance and dis­so­nance that had noth­ing to do with con­di­tion­ing, but instead were a nat­ur­al result of the over­tone series and could be math­e­mat­i­cal­ly and phys­i­o­log­i­cal­ly explained.

Hauer, in con­trast to Schoen­berg, had no incli­na­tion to eman­ci­pate com­po­si­tion from dis­so­nance, but instead searched for a method of har­mo­niz­ing twelve-tone rows effec­tive­ly and sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly, depart­ing from the tonal sys­tem, but still regard­ing aes­thet­ic prin­ci­ples as hav­ing impor­tance. Hauer also devel­oped a sys­tem of 44 “Tropen”, or divi­sions of the rows that gave fur­ther order to his com­po­si­tion­al tech­nique. Though Hauer lat­er left this style of com­po­si­tion, it pro­vid­ed the basis for Steinbauer’s work.

Stein­bauer referred to Hauer’s com­po­si­tion­al style as the “stren­gen Satz” (strict com­po­si­tion), and looked for a way to devel­op a “freien Satz” (free com­po­si­tion). He did this by exam­in­ing the way the tonal sys­tem func­tions in music and mak­ing analo­gies to the twelve-tone sys­tem. In tonal music, he rea­soned, many tones are used that don’t strict­ly “belong” to the chord but which are gen­er­al­ly bor­rowed from the scale in the same key.Therefore, the same prin­ci­ple could be applied in the twelve-tone sys­tem. Using what Stein­bauer called “Rem­i­niszenz-tönen” (rem­i­nis­cent notes), he found the “Akko­rd­frem­den Töne” (non-chord tones) that he need­ed to be able to freely com­pose with­in this rel­a­tive­ly strict sys­tem. Final­ly he devel­oped a tech­nique known as the “Vierk­lang­grup­pen­tech­nik” (four-note-chord tech­nique) which enabled him to sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly har­mo­nize any twelve-tone row.

It is this work by Stein­bauer which pro­vides the basic com­po­si­tion­al tech­nique for the some 40-odd com­posers, many of whom stud­ied per­son­al­ly with Stein­bauer, and most of whom live in Aus­tria and Ger­many. Among them is Hel­mut Neu­mann, the com­pos­er of the cycle which I have cho­sen to ana­lyze. Neu­mann, after study­ing and work­ing with a vari­ety of com­po­si­tion­al styles, chose to com­pose exclu­sive­ly in the style of the “Third Vien­nese School” and his cycle, Op. 102, is no excep­tion.