Editing Anton Webern (section)

===1950s onward: Beyond (late) Webern===

{{Quote box|bgcolor=#FFFFF0|width=25%|quoted=true|salign=right|[H]ermetic constructivism seems infused with intense emotion, ... diffused across the ... surface of the music. Gone is the mono-directional thrust of Classical and Romantic music; in its place a world of rotations and reflections, opening myriad paths for the listener to trace through textures of luminous clarity yet beguiling ambiguity.|source=[[George Benjamin (composer)|George Benjamin]] described Webern's Op. 21.{{sfn|Service|2013}} Many{{efn|Among these were Feldman, Pousseur,{{efn|See ''[[Scambi]]'', 1957.}} Rochberg,{{sfnm|Rochberg|2004|1loc=9–11, 20–22|Wlodarski|2019|2loc=62, 179}} Stravinsky,{{sfn|Sills|2022|loc=286–287}} and [[La Monte Young]].}} noted floating, spatial, static, or [[Nonchord tone#Suspension and retardation|suspended]] qualities in some of Webern's music. Johnson noted spatial metaphors.{{sfn|Johnson|1999|loc=28, 48, 54–55, 65–66, 69, 88, 110, 217, 231}}}}

Through late 1950s onward, Webern's work reached musicians as far removed as [[Frank Zappa]],{{sfn|Broyles|2004|loc=229}} yet many post-war European musicians and scholars had already begun to look beyond{{sfn|Erwin|2020|loc=93}} as much as ''back'' at Webern in his context. Nono advocated for a more humanistic understanding of Webern's music.{{sfn|Iddon|2013|loc=90–98, 115–116, 142–143, 258}}

Adorno lectured that in the prevailing climate "artists like Berg or Webern would hardly be able to make it" ("The Aging of the New Music", 1954). Against the "static idea of music" and "[[Totalitarianism|total]] [[Dialectic of Enlightenment#Topics and themes|rationalization]]" of the "pointillist constructivists," he advocated for more [[Subject (philosophy)|subjectivity]], citing ''[[Wassily Kandinsky#Concerning the spiritual in art|Über das Geistige in der Kunst]]'' (1911), in which [[Wassily Kandinsky]] wrote: "Schoenberg's [expressionist] music leads us to where musical experience is a matter not of the ear, but of the soul—and from this point begins the music of the future."

In the 1960s, many began to describe Webern and his like as a "[[dead end street|dead end]]".{{sfn|Straus|1999|loc=330–332}}{{efn|[[Olin Downes]] described Op. 28 as "Dead End music" in 1941.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=667}} Another critic wrote in 1929: "If modernism depended for progress upon the Weberns, it would get nowhere."{{sfn|Slonimsky|1994|loc=251}}}} Rochberg felt "Webern's music leaves his followers no new, unexplored territory."{{sfn|Wlodarski|2019|loc=59}} Stravinsky judged Webern "too original ... too purely himself. ... [T]he entire world had to imitate him [and] fail; of course it will blame Webern"; he blamed post-Webernism: "[T]he music now being charged to his name can neither diminish his strength nor stale his perfection."{{sfn|Watkins|1988|loc=390–391}}

In ''[[Votre Faust]]'' (1960–1968), Pousseur quoted and his protagonist Henri analyzed Webern's Op. 31. Yet there were already several elements of [[late modernism|late]] or [[postmodernism]] (e.g., [[eclecticism]] of historical styles, [[Indeterminacy (music)|mobile]] form, polyvalent roles).{{sfn|Ehman|2013|loc=178}} This coincided with a wider rapprochement with Berg,{{sfnm|Street|2005|1loc=101–103|Watkins|1988|2loc=651}} whose example Pousseur cited,{{sfnm|Bregegere|2014|1loc=147|Pousseur|2009|2loc=227}} from whose music he also quoted, and whose writings he translated into French in the 1950s.{{sfnm|Berg|1957|Berg|2014|2loc=ix}} Boulez was "thrilled" by Berg's "universe ... never completed, always in expansion—a world so ... inexhaustible," referring to the rigorously organized, only partly twelve-tone [[Kammerkonzert (Berg)|Chamber Concerto]].{{efn|Adorno advocated for the completion of ''[[Lulu (opera)|Lulu]]'', writing that it "reveals the extent of its quality the longer and more deeply one immerses oneself in it". Boulez conducted the 1979 première after [[Friedrich Cerha|Cerha]]'s orchestration.}}

Engaging with Webern's atonal works by some contrast to earlier post-Webernism, both [[Brian Ferneyhough|Ferneyhough]] and [[Helmut Lachenmann|Lachenmann]] expanded upon and went further than Webern in attention to the smallest of details and the use of ever more radically [[extended technique]]s. Ferneyhough's 1967 Sonatas for string quartet included atonal sections much in the style of Webern's Op. 9, yet more intensely sustained. In a comparison to his own 1969 ''Air'', Lachenmann wrote of "a melody made of a ''single'' note ... in the viola part" of Webern's Op. 10/iv (mm. 2–4) amid "the mere ruins of the traditional linguistic context," observing that "the pure tone, now living in tonal exile, has in this new context no aesthetic advantage over pure noise" ("Hearing [Hören] is Defenseless—without Listening [Hören]", 1985).