Josef Matthias Hauer (March 19, 1883 – September 22, 1959) was an Austrian composer and music theorist. He is best known 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 was also an important early theorist of twelve-tone music and composition.
Hauer "detested all art that expressed ideas, programmes or feelings,"[2] instead believing that it was "essential...to raise music to its highest...level," [3] a "purely spiritual, supersensual music composed according to impersonal rules,"[4] and many of his compositions reflect this in their direct, often athematic, 'cerebral' approach. Hauer's music is diverse, however, and not all of it embraces this aesthetic position.
- ^ Whittall 2008, 26.
- ^ Lichtenfeld 2001, 135.
- ^ Hauer,[citation needed] p. 604, quoted in Whittall 2008, 25.
- ^ Lichtenfeld 2001, 134–35.