# Josef Matthias Hauer



## Jobis

'Josef Matthias Hauer (March 19, 1883 - September 22, 1959) was an Austrian composer and music theorist. He is most famous for developing, independent of and a year or two before Arnold Schoenberg, a method for composing with all 12 notes of the chromatic scale. Hauer was also an important early theorist of twelve-tone music and composition.

Hauer "detested all art that expressed ideas, programmes or feelings," instead believing that it was "essential...to raise music to its highest...level," a, "purely spiritual, supersensual music composed according to impersonal rules," and many of his compositions reflect this in their direct, often athematic, 'cerebral' approach. Hauer's music is diverse, however, and not all of it embraces this aesthetic position.'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Matthias_Hauer

A very underrated composer! Like Berg and Schoenberg he strikes me as both a modernist and a late romantic; more accessible than those composers of the second Viennese school (to those wary of atonality) and equally valuable one might argue.

As mentioned in the wikipedia article, some of his music sounds quite expressive:






Other pieces are more abstract and athematic:






I'm very curious to discover more of his music, especially that which embodies those 'spiritual, supersensual' ideals.


----------



## ganio

"Hauer discovered the 44 tropes, pairs of complementary hexachords, in 1921 allowing him to classify any of the 479,001,600 twelve-tone melodies into one of forty-four types" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trope_(music)

A teacher of mine once called Hauer the Czerny of dodecaphony. I doubt this was meant as a compliment... but he also mentioned _Wandlungen_, _Der Menschen Weg_, and _Musik-Film_ as his better works.


----------

