Йозеф Маттиас Хауэр: Австриялық композитор және музыка теорияшысы

Austrian composer and music theorist

Josef Matthias Hauer (March 19, 1883 – September 22, 1959) was an Austrian composer and music theorist. He is best known 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.

Hauer was born in Wiener Neustadt and died in Vienna. He had an early musical training in cello, choral conducting, and organ, and claimed to have been self taught in theory and composition. According to one scholar, Hauer's twelve tone music was balanced between the "obligatory rule" that each composition follow an arrangement of the total chromatic: "the 'Constellation' or "Grundgestalt' ('basic shape')," and his often emphasized concept of tropes, or unordered arrangement of a pair of hexachords. This interpretation seems largely drawn from Hauer's theoretical writing of the early to mid 1920s in which he outlines these techniques. But a closer look at Hauer's compositional output reveals that a significant portion of his twelve tone music from the 1920s and 1930s employs strictly ordered rows, as do the Zwölftonspiele (Twelve tone pieces) that follow. Despite this, Hauer is often mentioned as the inventor of the tropes in contrast to Arnold Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School, who are thought of as advocates of Schoenberg's twelve tone method. (In fact, many of the twelve tone pieces by Schoenberg and his student Alban Berg do not strictly follow this method.) After 1940, Hauer wrote exclusively Zwölftonspiele, designated sometimes by number, sometimes by date. He wrote about one thousand such pieces, most of which are lost.

Since the 1920s Hauer has figured in literature, e. g., in de's novel Sonnenmelodie (1923) and Franz Werfel's de (1924 the character Matthias Fischboeck). Late in life Hauer spoke about Thomas Mann, as well as Theodor W. Adorno, with great bitterness, for he felt that both men had misunderstood him. Adorno had written about Hauer, but only disparagingly. Because of his later achievements and developments it has also been assumed by many scholars that Hauer is also a model for the "Joculator Basiliensis" in Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game.