Musical Style
Hauer's compositional techniques are extraordinarily various, often change from one piece to the next. These range from building-block techniques to methods using a chord series that is generated out of the twelve-tone row ("Melos"). The so-called 44 "tropes" and their compositional usage ("trope-technique") are essential to Hauer's twelve-tone techniques. In contrast to a twelve-tone row that contains a fixed succession of twelve tones, a trope consists of two complementary hexachords in which there is no fixed tone sequence. The tropes are used for structural and intervallic views on the twelve-tone system. Every trope offers certain symmetries that can be used by the composer.
After 1940, Hauer wrote exclusively Zwölftonspiele ("Twelve-tone Games" or "Twelve-tone Playing"), designated sometimes by number, sometimes by date. He wrote about one thousand such pieces, most of them lost.
Read more about this topic: Josef Matthias Hauer
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