Josef Matthias Hauer
On the Essence of Music
Fundamentals of Twelve-Tone Music
Vienna 1920. With annotations by Arnold Schönberg

As early as 1920 Josef Matthias Hauer formulated his idea of composing with the total chromatic set in a short book titled On the Essence of Music: Fundamentals of Twelve-Tone Music. Hauer presented his thoughts about a twelve-tone scale, which should run its course so as to avoid any implication of a tonic emphasis. Schönberg later admitted having read the text soon after receiving it from the publisher Waldheim-Eberle on 18 September 1920, which is nearly one year before his own attempts to move in the direction detailed by Hauer. But the creative results as found in Hauer’s works never had similarities with Schönberg’s music. Hauer understood the twelve-tone row as a law (“Nomos“ in Greek), which was self-sufficient enough to be presented entirely, if somewhat archaically, in half-notes at the opening of his piano piece Nomos, op. 19. But from the time of Schönberg’s first attempts with the twelve-tone method, the row literally remained in the background. What one heard instead were characteristic musical ideas, which were developed and transformed from a fixed tone row: “the biggest step forward,“ Schönberg wrote in 1932, “was not the one to 12 tones; rather, it was the invention of innumerable ways to create themes and all other material from a basic shape.“