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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Webern's Lost Cello Sonata and Music in the Aphoristic Style

Webern's Lost Cello Sonata and Music in the Aphoristic Style

Lal, Rajan

Hardcover

Series: Royal Musical Association Monographs

Classical MusicGeneral MusicMusic Theory

ISBN10: 1041159005
ISBN13: 9781041159001
Publisher: Routledge
Published: Mar 24 2026
Pages: 124
Weight: 0.67
Height: 0.38 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English

This book offers a music-analytical and historical exploration of the 'aphoristic style'; small yet strident modernist works written by the Second Viennese School between 1909 and 1914, challenging long-held misconceptions about early twentieth-century atonal music.

Lal establishes the nature and chronology of the aphoristic corpus, exploring the matter of modernist 'priority' particularly important to Arnold Schoenberg and Anton von Webern. This study also explores the complex intertextual nature of aphoristic works written less as 'contextual' enterprises and more as responses to other similarly proportioned miniatures. In music-analytical and music-theoretical terms, the book offers the first major analysis of the extant movement of Webern's Cello Sonata (1914), before using this death-knell of the aphoristic style as a springboard to generalise an approachable but mathematically rigorous harmonic lexicon for post-tonal music. Concepts such as symmetry, primitive views of sustained harmonic devices, and ternary form are used to argue that as the harmonies of the aphoristic corpus look into the future, other features simultaneously wrestle such works into an imagined primordial musical past.

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