Max Butting - Tone Language

Tone Language

Butting's music at first took up the style of Anton Bruckner and Max Reger and moved closer to more modern trends in the 1920s. He gradually managed to develop a distinctive personal style, which is pre-eminently characterized by counter-point and is equally close to both musical neoclassicism and expressionism. The meter/rhythm is complex for the most part and commonly contains changes in time. The harmony varies within an often dissonant, sharpened tonality. From time to time, there are twelve-tone themes, for example in Sinfonie Nr. 9, however Butting never develops a true dodecaphony, in the sense of Arnold Schoenberg, whom he critically admired. The composer also formally oriented himself on traditional models, such as the sonata form, however he commonly varied it or gave it up entirely in more than a few works in favor of a development form which has no breaks. He always tried to find an individual form for each work, as his symphonic works show in an exemplary manner, in which all cyclic formations are represented, from single-movement to five-movement works.

A rather moderately productive composer before 1945 and almost completely silenced during the Nazi regime, Butting experienced a new creative impetus after the end of the war. The fact that the largest number of his works by far were created in the GDR is explainable above all in that he now made it one of his responsibilities to also write "everyday music", which was supposed to fulfill the state demand for a popular, easy-to-understand art. He started from some works he had already written especially for the radio at the end of the 1920s, which are stylistically close to sophisticated light music.

In the center of Butting's works are the ten symphonies, which identify him as one of the most important German symphonists of his generation. In addition to these, he wrote a chamber symphony for thirteen solo instruments, two symphoniettas ("little symphonies") and a triptychon for large orchestra. Aside from that, he wrote chamber music above all, among which ten string quartets stand out. Others of his remaining works include a piano concerto and a flute concerto, numerous shorter orchestral pieces, predominantly small piano works, as well as the oratorio "Das Memorandum", the opera "Plautus im Nonnenkloster" after Conrad Ferdinand Meyer and several cantatas.