The Austrian composer Anton Webern (1883-1945) is one of the major figures of musical modernism. His mature works comprise two styles: the so-called free atonal music composed between 1907 and 1924, and the twelve-tone serial music that began in 1924 and extended through the remainder of his creative life. In this book an eminent music theorist presents the first systematic and in-depth study of the early atonal works, from the George Lieder, opus 3, through the Latin Canons, opus 16. Drawing on music-analytical procedures that he and other scholars have developed in recent years, Allen Forte argues that a single compositional system underlies all of Webern's atonal music. Forte examines such elements as pitch, register, timbre, rhythm, form, and text setting, showing how Webern displaced the functional connections of traditional tonality to create a totally new sonic universe. Although the main thrust of the study is music-analytical in nature, Forte also considers historical context and significant biographical aspects of the individual works, as well as word-music relations in the music with text.

This important new study reassesses the position of Anton Webern in twentieth-century music. The twelve-note method of composition adopted by Anton Webern had profound consequences for composers of the next generation such as Stockhausen and Boulez, who saw Webern's music as revolutionary. In her detailed analyses, however, Professor Bailey demonstrates a fundamentally traditional aspect to Webern's creativity, when describing his own music. Professor Bailey analyses all Webern's twelve-note works (from Op. 17 to Op. 31) i.e. the instrumental and vocal music written between 1924 and 1943. These analyses draw on sketch material recently made available at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel and include transcriptions of little-known drafts and sketches. A most valuable aspect of the book is the inclusion in appendices of such materials as a complete explanation of the row content of each work, the correct prime form of each of the rows from Op. 20 onwards, with a matrix constructed for each, and exhaustive row analyses.

Widely recognized as the definitive work in its field ever since its original publication in 1962, Serial Composition and Atonality remains an unsurpassed introduction to the technical features of what is probably the most revolutionary body of work since the beginnings of polyphony. In the analysis of specific compositions there is first and last of all a concern with the musical surface—an attempt to trace connections and distinctions there before offering any deeper-level constructions, and to offer none where their effects are not obvious on more immediate levels of musical experience. In this sixth edition of the book, George Perle employs the new and more consistent terminology for the identification of transpositional levels of twelve-tone sets that he first proposed in Twelve-Tone Tonality (1977).