By: Joseph Straus, CUNY Graduate Center
Abstract of Video:
Anton Webern (1883–1945) was a major figure in 20th-century modernist music. A devoted student of Arnold Schoenberg, he and his fellow student, Alban Berg, together with their teacher, comprised what is sometimes called the Second Viennese School. His song, “Wie bin ich froh!,” is a mature twelve-tone composition. The analyzed passage consists of only two series-forms, both of which embed numerous forms of sc(014), resulting in a high degree of motivic density.
Bibliography:
Kathryn Bailey, The Twelve-Note Music of Anton Webern (Cambridge University Press, 1991).
Christopher Barry, “Being, Becoming, and Death in Twelve-Tone Music: ‘Wie bin ich froh!’ as Epitaph,” Intégral 28–29 (2014): 81–123.
Joseph Straus, The Art of Post-Tonal Analysis: Thirty-Three Graphic Music Analyses (Oxford University Press, 2022).
About the Author:
Joseph Straus is Distinguished Professor of Music Theory at the CUNY Graduate Center. With a specialization in music since 1900, he has written numerous technical music-theoretical articles and scholarly monographs on a variety of topics in modernist music, including Remaking the Past: Musical Modernism and the Influence of the Tonal Tradition (Harvard University Press, 1990), The Music of Ruth Crawford Seeger (Cambridge University Press, 1995), Stravinsky's Late Music (Cambridge University Press, 2001), and Twelve-Tone Music in America (Cambridge University Press, 2009). He is also the author of Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory (4th ed., Norton, 2016).