Unlike his fellow Schoenbergian acolyte, Alban Berg, Anton Webern was the more cerebral, quiet, and detached.\u00a0\u00a0 While Berg is commonly thought of as more lyrical, comfortable in the larger forms of concerto and opera, Webern pursued a style of abstraction, brevity, and an almost mathematical precision of structure.\u00a0\u00a0 He is known for his lightly orchestrated, almost pointillist textures.\u00a0 Like pinpoints of sound, that \u201cping\u201d from disparate points, his works are aphoristic and brief almost to an extreme.\u00a0 And what is almost indiscernible to most listeners is the frequent infusion in his mature style of counterpoint in all its glory:\u00a0 invertible, canonic, retrograde, every technique from the golden age of counterpoint, the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries.\u00a0 And why not? For despite his avant-garde compositions, he was a trained musicologist, whose doctoral dissertation was on one of the great collections of early sixteenth-century polyphonic sacred vocal music.\u00a0 He simply took his interests and training way into the future.\u00a0 In his maturity he was a relentless exponent of the rigorous application of 12-tone\u2014or serial\u2014techniques, but early on, like his mentor Schoenberg and his fellow student, Berg, he quickly left tonality behind and produced works that are conveniently called atonal.\u00a0\u00a0 This period in the artistic lives of the three didn\u2019t last long, chiefly centering very roughly around the years 1908-1923.\u00a0 A cardinal virtue of tonality, especially in the late romantic period, is its inherent capacity to sustain long music structures\u2014that\u2019s why, for example, symphonies of the time grew longer and longer, as in Mahler.\u00a0 In the sense of remembering from whence you came harmonically speaking, no matter how distant you may go in tonal regions, the way home is logical, directed and forceful in tonality.\u00a0 Lacking this musical compass, atonal works are necessarily shorter, even brief, to avoid the concomitant sensation of wandering on and on until the music just stops, undirected.<\/p>\n
Webern composed his Five Movements for String Quartet, <\/em>op. 5 in 1909, at the height of his atonal period, and dedicated it to the memory of his revered mother. He later revised the work in 1929, recasting it for string orchestra.\u00a0\u00a0 It is a complete example of Webern\u2019s approach to composition.\u00a0 The five movements average no more than about two minutes in length and display the composer\u2019s gift for instrumental tone color, using for example, the wood of the bow, harmonics, playing near the instrument\u2019s bridge, and pizzicato<\/em>.\u00a0 These sounds are now familiar from Bart\u00f3k, and, of course, went on to become common coin.\u00a0 Webern, true to his roots in the \u201cfirst Viennese School,\u201d employed traditional musical forms\u2014although remarkably compressed and almost unperceivable.\u00a0\u00a0 Extremes of register, disjunct melodic intervals, and frequent changes of mood complete the picture.\u00a0 The five movements are in a typical classical order of tempo and character:\u00a0 outer movements with motion, slow interior ones, and a kind of scherzo in the middle.\u00a0\u00a0 Forget the dissonance, the aphoristic brevity, and the abstractions.\u00a0 Atonality is not the point amidst the many charms of these little gems.\u00a0 They are perfect examples of what Stravinsky characterized as Webern\u2019s \u201cdazzling diamonds.\u201d<\/p>\n –Wm. E. Runyan<\/p>\n \u00a92015 William E. Runyan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"program_note_tax":[6],"class_list":["post-383","program_note","type-program_note","status-publish","hentry","program_note_tax-antonwebern"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/program_note\/383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/program_note"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/program_note"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"program_note_tax","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/program_note_tax?post=383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}