Josef Matthias Hauer - Life

Life

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. In 1918 he published his first work on music theory (a tone-color theory based on Goethe's Theory of Colours). In August 1919 he published his "law of the twelve tones", requiring that all twelve chromatic notes sound before any is repeated. This he developed and first articulated theoretically in Vom Wesen der Musikalischen (1920), before Schoenberg’s earliest writings on twelve-tone technique.

Hauer wrote prolifically, both music and prose, until 1938, when his music was added to the touring Nazi "degenerate art" (Entartete Kunst) exhibit. He stayed in Austria through the war, and, in fear, publishing nothing. Even after the war, however, he published little more, although it is thought that several hundred pieces remain in manuscript.

Read more about this topic:  Josef Matthias Hauer

Famous quotes containing the word life:

    Our life of poverty is as necessary as the work itself. Only in heaven will we see how much we owe to the poor for helping us to love God better because of them.
    Mother Teresa (b. 1910)

    I have almost forgot the taste of fears.
    The time has been, my senses would have cooled
    To hear a night-shriek, and my fell of hair
    Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir
    As life were in’t. I have supped full with horrors;
    Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts,
    Cannot once start me.
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    “Is there life on Mars?” “No, not there either.”
    —Russian saying popular in the Soviet period, trans. by Vladimir Ivanovich Shlyakov (1993)