Josef Matthias Hauer

Josef Matthias Hauer

Josef Mattias Hauer (March 19, 1883 – September 22, 1959) was an Austrian composer and music theorist. He is most famous for developing, independent of and a year or two before Arnold Schoenberg, a method for composing with all 12 notes of the chromatic scale.

Hauer "detested all art that expressed ideas, programmes or feelings," instead believing that it was "essential...to raise music to its highest...level," a, "purely spiritual, supersensual music composed according to impersonal rules," and many of his compositions reflect this in their direct, often athematic, 'cerebral' approach.

His twelve-tone music was balanced between the "obligatory rule" that each composition follow an arrangement of the total chromatic: "the 'Constellation' or "Grundgestalt' ('basic shape')," and his often emphasized concept of tropes, or unordered arrangement of a pair of hexachords