Anton Webern

Anton Webern took his teacher Arnold Schoenberg's twelve tone technique and and pared it down to the bare essentials - his pieces tend to be short, minimalist and quite unsettling. They are also probably nearly incomprehensible to the unschooled ear (including mine), but in a cool kinda way. It's really weird music, quite austere and beautiful.

Webern was shot at the end of World War II by an unhinged American soldier. There's a Thomas Pynchon quote from "Gravity's Rainbow" that kinda makes this into an epic conspiracy to keep advanced European music down. It kinda worked, in the end the more simple minded easy listening minimalist music of Philip Glass became the bestselling classical music.

"Shot in May, by the Americans. Senseless, accidental if you believe in accidents -- some mess cook from North Carolina, some late draftee with a .45 he hardly knew how to use, too late for WWII, but not for Webern. The excuse for raiding the house was that Webern's brother was in the black market. Who isn't? Do you know what kind of myth that's going to make in a thousand years? The young barbarians coming in to murder the Last European, standing at the far end of what'd been going on since Bach, an expansion of music's polymorphous perversity till all notes were truly equal at last. . . . Where was there to go after Webern? It was the moment of maximum freedom. It all had to come down. Another Götterdämmerung."

Drei Kleine Stücke Opus 11




Symphonie Opus 11: