By way of intro­duc­tion, the first sec­tion of this work will involve a brief descrip­tion of the the­ory Neu­mann used to com­pose his cycle Op. 102 for bari­tone, soprano and piano. This the­ory, largely unknown out­side of the German-speaking world is for­mally called the “Klan­grei­hen – Kom­po­si­tion­slehre der drit­ten Wiener Kom­po­si­tion­ss­chule”, trans­lated in this work as “Steinbauer’s tone-row com­po­si­tional method”.This method of com­po­si­tion is a syn­the­sis of var­i­ous mod­ern con­sid­er­a­tions devel­oped over the last hun­dred years based on the divi­sion of the octave into 12 tones sep­a­rated from each other by half steps instead of divided into scales of seven tones sep­a­rated by dif­fer­ent inter­vals. It began, in this form, not with the well-known work of Arnold Schoen­berg, but sev­eral years ear­lier (circa 1913) with the work of Josef Matthias Hauer (1883−1959), an Aus­trian musi­cian, com­poser and music the­o­rist. Though both men began with the same basic ideas, they devel­oped them in dra­mat­i­cally dif­fer­ent directions.

Hauer, hav­ing doc­u­mented his ideas very rarely and being a mere pri­mary school teacher, was never truly rec­og­nized for his work next to Schoen­berg, a pro­lific and well-known pro­fes­sor of com­po­si­tion. Hauer is not, how­ever, the founder of this “Third Vien­nese School”; that title belongs to Oth­mar Stein­bauer, a man even less well-known than Hauer Stein­bauer, hav­ing stud­ied with Schoen­berg in Berlin, aban­doned Schoenberg’s musi­cal ideals and style of com­po­si­tion com­pletely in 1928 and turned to Hauer, with whom he devel­oped a close friend­ship in Vienna.

From 1930 until his death in 1962, Stein­bauer worked on a com­po­si­tional the­ory that began from very sim­i­lar prin­ci­ples as those of Hauer, though their com­po­si­tional paths also ended up going in very dif­fer­ent direc­tions from one another. Stein­bauer died before pub­lish­ing his work, and so his ideas remained unknown to the pub­lic with the excep­tion of his com­po­si­tion stu­dents until one of them, Hel­mut Neu­mann (b.1938), com­pleted and pub­lished them for the first time in 2002.Arnold Schoen­berg attempted to break free from tonal ideas of dis­so­nance and con­so­nance– in effect to free com­po­si­tion from the rules of tonal­ity which he believed were the result of hun­dreds of years of aural con­di­tion­ing. He did so in his so-called “12-tone tech­nique” of seri­al­ism. Hauer and Stein­bauer, in con­trast, believed in the need for strict rules in com­po­si­tion but also in a fun­da­men­tal, human recog­ni­tion of con­so­nance and dis­so­nance that had noth­ing to do with con­di­tion­ing, but instead were a nat­ural result of the over­tone series and could be math­e­mat­i­cally and phys­i­o­log­i­cally explained.

Hauer, in con­trast to Schoen­berg, had no incli­na­tion to eman­ci­pate com­po­si­tion from dis­so­nance, but instead searched for a method of har­mo­niz­ing twelve-tone rows effec­tively and sys­tem­at­i­cally, depart­ing from the tonal sys­tem, but still regard­ing aes­thetic prin­ci­ples as hav­ing impor­tance. Hauer also devel­oped a sys­tem of 44 “Tropen”, or divi­sions of the rows that gave fur­ther order to his com­po­si­tional tech­nique. Though Hauer later left this style of com­po­si­tion, it pro­vided the basis for Steinbauer’s work.

Stein­bauer referred to Hauer’s com­po­si­tional style as the “stren­gen Satz” (strict com­po­si­tion), and looked for a way to develop a “freien Satz” (free com­po­si­tion). He did this by exam­in­ing the way the tonal sys­tem func­tions in music and mak­ing analo­gies to the twelve-tone sys­tem. In tonal music, he rea­soned, many tones are used that don’t strictly “belong” to the chord but which are gen­er­ally bor­rowed from the scale in the same key.Therefore, the same prin­ci­ple could be applied in the twelve-tone sys­tem. Using what Stein­bauer called “Reminiszenz-tönen” (rem­i­nis­cent notes), he found the “Akko­rd­frem­den Töne” (non-chord tones) that he needed to be able to freely com­pose within this rel­a­tively strict sys­tem. Finally he devel­oped a tech­nique known as the “Vierk­lang­grup­pen­tech­nik” (four-note-chord tech­nique) which enabled him to sys­tem­at­i­cally har­mo­nize any twelve-tone row.

It is this work by Stein­bauer which pro­vides the basic com­po­si­tional tech­nique for the some 40-odd com­posers, many of whom stud­ied per­son­ally with Stein­bauer, and most of whom live in Aus­tria and Ger­many. Among them is Hel­mut Neu­mann, the com­poser of the cycle which I have cho­sen to ana­lyze. Neu­mann, after study­ing and work­ing with a vari­ety of com­po­si­tional styles, chose to com­pose exclu­sively in the style of the “Third Vien­nese School” and his cycle, Op. 102, is no exception.