Concerto for Nine Instruments (Webern)


's Concerto for Nine Instruments, Op. 24, Op. 24, written in 1934, is a twelve-tone concerto for nine instruments: flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, trumpet, trombone, violin, viola, and piano. It consists of three movements:
The concerto is based on a derived row, "often cited as a paragon of symmetrical construction". The tone row is shown below.

In the words of Luigi Dallapiccola, the concerto is "a work of incredible conciseness... and of unique concentration.... Although I did not understand the work completely, I had the feeling of finding an aesthetic and stylistic unity as great as I could wish for. ".
The second movement "limits quite severely the values of many domains," for example featuring "only two durational values," and, partly as a result, "features great uniformity in texture and gesture".
The tone row may be interpreted as: 019, 2te, 367, 458.

The opening displays " distinctive trichordal structuring," four of which "comprise an aggregate," or partition. "The six combinations of trichords generate three pairs of complementary hexachords". "Webern takes full advantage of this property in the Concerto," that under four appropriate transformations, the tone row maintains its unordered trichords. The hexachord featured is sometimes called the 'Ode-to-Napoleon' hexachord.
According to Brian Alegant, "he Latin square... clearly shows the built in redundancy of partition," four, and, "needless to say, Webern takes full advantage of this property in the Concerto":
For example, I5 = 548, 376, 2et, 109.

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