At first sight, Josef Matthias Hauer and John Cage may appear as each other’s opposites, in an aesthetical perspective. Hauer would in the later period of his work maintain the same principal composition method, where the twelve notes of the chromatic scale constitute the prime content of the music. For Cage however, any kind of sound could be used in music, and he would constantly invent new methods for composition.

But there are in fact common denominators in their music, especially of the late 1940’s, from which we have chosen the works performed in this programme. The most prominent feature in the music of both composers from this period, is the drastic reduction of musical elements. Although it is manifested in very different ways in the works by Hauer and Cage, it could nevertheless be taken as a sign of kinship.

In the brief Zwölftonspiele by Josef Matthias Hauer, composed more or less on a daily basis during the last two decades, the music has been deprived of almost all traditional variables,

such as tone colour, dynamics and rhythm, and only a regular change of the tonal content is left. Contrary to Arnold Schönberg, who at the same time and place (Vienna) also arrives at a composition method with twelve tones, Hauer liberates himself completely from the late romantic tradition, instead anticipating music that would appear several decades later, such as the American minimalism.

John Cage had already in the 1930’s created experimental percussion music with unusual sound sources often producing noise instead of pitches. But several works dating from the late 1940’s have a seemingly traditional tonal language, making a strong contrast also to his music based on chance operations that would emerge just a few years later. In the works of the late 1940’s, Cage uses small musical cells, such as chords or melodic fragments, that repeatedly appear in new combinations. Even if the ingredients seem to have a background in different musical traditions, they are deprived of any ordinary function. Also unconventional is the musical form, based on rhythmical series that also underlie the choreographies that some of these works were composed for.