Josef Matthias Hauer

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 believed that “the influence of the material world” interfered with “rais ing music to its highest, most spiritual level”, and disapproved of expression of “ideas, programmes or feelings” in art, instead favoring “spiritual, supersensual music composed according to impersonal rules”. 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. Life Hauer was born in Wiener Neustadt and died in Vienna. He had an early musical training in cello, choral conducting, and organ, and claimed to have been self-taught in theory and composition. This interpretation seems largely drawn from Hauer’s theoretical writing of the early to mid-1920s in which he outlines these techniques. But a closer look at Hauer’s compositional output rev