Other Harmony: Hauer

Hauer

Josef Matthias Hauer (1883–1959) was not a great composer, especially in comparison with his Viennese colleague of the 1920s, the other inventor of 12-tone music, Arnold Schoenberg. He didn’t have the poetic vision to write anything like Pierrot Lunaire, though his music was performed in Donaueschingen and in international festivals from time to time, sometimes conducted by Hermann Scherchen. He never captured much attention internationally, and is mostly known for short piano pieces, but he was an original thinker, and I have long been curious to know more about how he organized his music in six-note tropes, as opposed to 12-tone rows, so when I began to research Other Harmony, I decided to take a closer look at his music (...)