Anton Webern

Anton Webern, a disciple of Arnold Schoenberg, was a member of the Second Viennese School of composers, who formalized the principles of dodecaphony (twelve tone technique) and influenced the path classical music was to take in the twentieth century. Webern, who was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1883, was attacked for the degenerate nature of his compositions by the Nazi Party, even before they had seized power in Austria. After the war, Webern moved to Salzburg, where he was shot during the Allied occupation for smoking a cigar outside after curfew by an Army cook.

Webern published only thirty-one compositions in his lifetime, and most of his later works reflect his interest in early music (music composed before 1750). He uses unusual textures and timbres, and his works tend to be for only a small ensemble, with fragmented melodic lines that may be carried over from one instrument to another instrument. His twelve tone rows can be organized into smaller parts, so that a tone row may have inversions, retrogrades, or retrograde inversions not only of the whole tone row, but of its smaller divisions as well; this is a contrapuntal technique derived from the Baroque period.

Although Webern may not have been prodigious in his output, the influence he had on later composers is not to be underestimated. His compositions, along with the other composers of the Second Viennese School, led to the development of both serialism and minimalism, the two major schools of composition in the twentieth century.