Anton Webern's Concerto for Nine Instruments, Op. 24 (German: Konzert für neun Instrumente) is a twelve-tone chamber piece composed in 1934. Its tone row is one of the most notable in history. The piece is admired for its extreme concision and is considered a hallmark in the development of total serialism.
Webern began sketching an orchestral work on January 16, 1931. At one point, he conceived it as a piano concerto. In early February, Webern began attempting to create a melodic equivalent of a sator square. Webern had long been enamored of the square. In addition to writing "tenet" in his first sketch for the Concerto, he ended his lectures about new music by quoting it to his audience.[2][3]: 431 The essentially meaningless square arranges all the letters contained in the phrase "a[lpha] pater noster o[mega]" in highly palindromic configurations that read both horizontally and vertically.[4]
Webern ended up relying on a three-note musical germ (C♯–C–E) he had used in his 1905 String Quartet to generate the row. It is analogous to Ludwig van Beethoven's "Muss is Sein (Must it be)?" motif.[1] The minor second adjacent to a third proved highly malleable, and Webern constructed the remainder of the row by performing the standard dodecaphonic operations on it: inversion, reversal, reverse inversion, and transposition.
The opening trichord is a descending minor second (m2: B–B♭) followed by an ascending major third (M3: B♭–D). The second trichord reverses and inverts (RI) the intervals: M3↑ (E♭–G); m2↓ (G–F♯). The third trichord reverses (R) the original pattern: d4(M3)↓ (A♭–E); m2↑ (E–F). The final trichord inverts (I) the original pattern: m2↑ (C–C♯); M3↓ (C♯–A).[5]: 724
He developed the row quickly, but he would not be able to focus on the piece until 1934.[3]: 431–7 Once he settled on the scheme for the piece, it came rushing out in 1934.[1]
Although Webern finished the Concerto in time for Schoenberg's 60th birthday, it would take another year before its first performance. The composer was scheduled to conduct the premiere at the International Society for Contemporary Music Music Days in Prague, but he decided not to attend because of the festival's removal of Alban Berg's Wozzeck from its 1934 program.[7]: 155–6
Form
Webern hews to the usual structure of the genre and divides his Concerto into three movements. The writing is in Webern's highly unique version of klangfarbenmelodie. There are no soloists, but each instrument is playing miniature solos of 2–3 notes apiece which aggregate into the "gathering" implied by the title.[8]: 22
I. Etwas lebhaft
The first movement is marked "Etwas lebhaft" (somewhat lively) with a tempo of = 80. Webern's tone row is played a trichord at a time by the oboe, flute, trumpet, and clarinet. Each instrument slows the perceived tempo through a rhythmic decelerando. The oboe's sixteenth notes are answered by the flute's eighths. The trumpet notches the rhythms up slightly to eighth note triplets before the clarinet finishes the deceleration by playing in quarter note triplets. The bar has been divided in 8ths, 4ths, 6ths, and finally 3rds. To emphasize the deceleration, Webern asks the clarinet to execute a ritardando.
Entrances elide, and articulations are mismatched. The dynamic is f (forte), with a diminuendo to p (piano) that corresponds with the ritardando.
When the piano enters in the fourth bar, it summarizes the tone row in a written accelerando. The rhythmic progression is reversed exactly. Webern chooses a transposition of the retrograde inversion that also precisely reverses each trichord of the original row.[5]: 738 The piano also repeats the dynamic pattern and the variegated articulations of the first phrase. The first two statements of the Concerto form a mirror image, a recurring metaphor in Webern's music.
II. Sehr langsam
The second movement is marked "Sehr langsam" (very slow) with a mathematically identical tempo to the first movement = 40.
III. Sehr rasch
The finale is marked "Sehr rasch" (very quickly) and triples the speed of the previous movement to = 120. The movement has five sections, just like the sator square.[9] It uses the original form of the row that Webern worked out in his sketches, beginning on F. In the final fifteen bars, Webern arranges the trichords into the musical equivalent of the magic square that had inspired him.[10]
In the words of Luigi Dallapiccola, the concerto is "a work of incredible conciseness... and of unique concentration... . Although I did not understand the work completely, I had the feeling of finding an aesthetic and stylistic unity as great as I could wish for. [Prague, September 5, 1935]".[11]
The second movement "limits quite severely the values of many domains," for example featuring "only two durational values (quarter and half note[s])," and, partly as a result, "features great uniformity in texture and gesture".[12]
The tone row may be interpreted as: 019, 2te, 367, 458.[13]
The opening displays "[the Concerto's] distinctive trichordal structuring," four of which "comprise an aggregate," or partition.[14] "The six combinations of [the partition's] trichords generate three pairs of complementaryhexachords".[15] "Webern takes full advantage of this property [its fourfold degree of symmetry] in the Concerto," that under four appropriate transformations (T0T6I5IB), the tone row maintains its unordered trichords (j=019,091,etc., k=2te, l=367, and m=458). The hexachord featured is sometimes called the 'Ode-to-Napoleon' hexachord (014589).[16]
According to Brian Alegant, "[t]he Latin square... clearly shows the built in redundancy of [the] partition," four, and, "needless to say, Webern takes full advantage of this property in the Concerto":[13]
j
k
l
m
l
m
j
k
m
l
k
j
k
j
m
l
For example, I5 = 548, 376, 2et, 109.
Sources
^ abcPuffett, Kathryn Bailey. "Webern, Anton". Grove Music Online. 2001.
^Webern, Anton. The Path to the New Music. Edited by Willi Reich. Translated by Leo Black. Theodore Presser, 1960. 56.
^ abBailey, Kathryn (1996). "Symmetry as Nemesis: Webern and the First Movement of the Concerto, Opus 24", p. 245, Journal of Music Theory, vol. 40, no. 2 (Autumn), pp. 245–310.
^Hasty, Christopher (1981). "Segmentation and Process in Post-Tonal Music", pp. 63–64, Music Theory Spectrum, vol. 3, (Spring), pp. 54–73.
^ abBrian Alegant, "Cross-Partitions as Harmony and Voice Leading in Twelve-Tone Music", Music Theory Spectrum 23, no. 1 (Spring 2001), pp. 1–40, citation on p. 5.
^Van den Toorn, Pieter C. (1996). Music, Politics, and the Academy, pp. 128–129. ISBN0-520-20116-7.
Further reading
Gauldin, Robert (1977). "Pitch Structure in the Second Movement of Webern's Concerto Op. 24.", In Theory Only 2, no. 10: 8–22. Cited on p. 38 of Brian Alegant, "Cross-Partitions as Harmony and Voice Leading in Twelve-Tone Music", Music Theory Spectrum 23, no. 1 (Spring 2001), pp. 1–40.
Gauldin, Robert (1977). "The Magic Squares of the Third Movement of Webern's Concerto Op. 24." In Theory Only 2, nos. 11–12:32–42. Cited on p, 38 of Alegant 2001.
Hartwell, Robin (1979). "Rhythmic Organisation in the Serial Music of Anton Webern". PhD diss. Brighton: University of Sussex.
Stockhausen, Karlheinz (1963 [1953]). "Weberns Konzert für neun Instrumente op. 24". In his Texte zur Musik 1, edited by Dieter Schnebel, 24–31. DuMont Dokumente. Cologne: Verlag M. DuMont Schauberg. [First published in Melos, no. 20 (1953), 343–348.]
Straus, Joseph N. (2011). "Contextual-Inversion Spaces". Journal of Music Theory 55, no. 1 (Spring): 43–88.
Wintle, Christopher (1982). "Analysis and Performance: Webern's Concerto Op. 24/ii.", Music Analysis 1:73–100. Cited on p. 39 of Alegant 2001; on p. 19 of Jonathan Dunsby, "Guest Editorial: Performance and Analysis of Music", Music Analysis 8, nos. 1–2 (March–July 1989): 5–20; on pp. 74–75 of Catherine Nolan, "Structural Levels and Twelve-Tone Music: A Revisionist Analysis of the Second Movement of Webern's 'Piano Variations' Op. 27", Journal of Music Theory 39, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 47–76; on pp. 324, 328, and 339 of John Rink, "Musical Structure and Performance by Wallace Berry" (review), Music Analysis 9, no. 3 (October 1990), 319–339; on pp. 57 and 88 of Straus 2011; and on pp. 337 and 353 of Whittall 1987.
Whittall, Arnold (1987). "Webern and Multiple Meaning". Music Analysis 6, no. 3 (October): 333–353.
