Paul von Klenau - Gespräch mit dem Tod (Conversations with Death) (b. Copenhagen, 11 February 1883 - d. Copenhagen, 31 August 1946) [Preface]

Abstract

The development of twelve-tone music was an extremely messy affair. Contrary to the linear textbook account (which composer Michael Finnissy mocks as a patrilineal catechism: “and Schoenberg begat Webern who begat Stockhausen...”), the early twentieth-century saw a proliferation of composers devising wildly different systems for chromatic organisation. There was considerable overlap between these systems – to use a prominent example, Alban Berg utilised techniques developed by both Josef Mathias Hauer and his student Fritz Heinrich Klein in works from his “twelve-tone” period, which demarcates his musical development from that of Schoenberg and Webern. Nevertheless, the multiplicity of twelve-note systems (which might collectively be referred to as “total chromaticism”), their multiplicity of origins, and the wildly different aesthetic ends to which they were deployed, demonstrates that the linear, prescriptivist teleology of modern music – the story passed down from Theodor W. Adorno, René Leibowitz, and Pierre Boulez to contemporary textbooks – could only be conceived in retrospect.