Webern’s Lost Cello Sonata and Music in the Aphoristic Style (Royal Musical Association Monographs)

This book offers a music-analytical and historical exploration of the ‘aphoristic style’; small yet strident modernist works written by the Second Viennese School between 1909 and 1914, challenging long-held misconceptions about early twentieth-century atonal music. Lal establishes the nature and chronology of the aphoristic corpus, exploring the matter of modernist ‘priority’ particularly important to Arnold Schoenberg and Anton von Webern.This study also explores the complex intertextual nature of aphoristic works written less as ‘contextual’ enterprises and more as responses to other similarly proportioned miniatures.In music-analytical and music-theoretical terms, the book offers the first major analysis of the extant movement of Webern’s Cello Sonata (1914), before using this death-knell of the aphoristic style as a springboard to generalise an approachable but mathematically rigorous harmonic lexicon for post-tonal music.Concepts such as symmetry, primitive views of sustained har