Composers: Pianissimo Prophet

• Share

Some composers challenge posterity with a roar. Others woo it with seductive languor or graceful wit. Austrian Composer Anton Webern conjured it with a whisper. A shy, intense man who physically shrank from noise, he wrote spare, slight pieces filled with directions like "scarcely audible" and "dying away." Such was the understated economy of his scores that his life's work amounts to a bare three hours of playing time. Nearly all of his compositions take less than ten minutes to perform. He turned out works containing as much silence as music, and that was how an indifferent world received them—with silence.

Yet, today, the man whom the Viennese called "the master of pianissimo" has a resounding worldwide reputation. "Probably," says Conductor Robert Craft, "there isn't a composer writing now, or hardly a composition written—even electronic—in which his influence can't be traced."

This year, Dartmouth College's Congregation of the Arts, a summer program whose concerts normally concentrate on works of living composers, took the unusual step of devoting seven days to Webern. The performances demonstrated how much of Webern's vocabulary has passed into the everyday musical language. As such, they sometimes sounded like a lexicon of contemporary clichés: jagged leaps of melody, pointillistic instrumental textures, dryly intellectual twelve-tone patterns. At other times they underlined qualities in Webern's music that have remained fresh and inimitable to this day: delicacy, astringent lyricism, nearly inhuman purity of craftsmanship.

Logical Extremes. Born of a solid landowner family in 1883, Webern was trained as a musicologist at the University of Vienna. In 1904, while still a student, he met Arnold Schoenberg and became his lifelong friend and disciple in the cause of overthrowing tonal music. In many areas Webern took Schoenberg's innovations and carried them to logical extremes. When Schoenberg dissolved traditional tonality but continued to work with late Romantic forms, Webern dissolved those too. He obliterated vertical harmonies, broke up melodies into one-or two-note fragments for each instrument and swept away all sense of development and climax. "Once stated," he said, "a theme has expressed all it has to say." In Five Pieces for orchestra and Six Bagatelles for string quartet (both 1913), his notes are scattered like stars in the night sky: tiny fire points in an icy black void.

When Schoenberg discovered how to organize atonal music by creating a new "scale" for each composition—an arbitrarily arranged series of the twelve chromatic tones—Webern extended the serial principle to such areas as rhythm and dynamics. Here he approached a state of total abstraction in which a piece would unfold entirely in accordance with the rules invented for it in advance by the composer, much as a computer responds to its mathematical programming.