1920s: The Avant-Garde in Music

Avant-gardists pursued a radically new understanding of art: central to their work was the break with tradition and the negation of the artwork’s autonomy as well as of bourgeois institutions. These characteristics, however, were not to be found in the Austrian music scene of the 1920s. Composers such as Arnold Schönberg, Anton Webern and Alban Berg, although feeling the need to innovate, saw their artistic activities as firmly rooted in tradition. However, the “composition with twelve tones that are related only with one another” (12-Tone Technique), developed by Schönberg in the 1920s, exerted great influence on international avant-garde currents in the post-war period. Only the composer Josef Matthias Hauer (who, independent of Schönberg, also designed a 12-tone system of composition) wanted to put an end to traditional music around 1920 by randomly generating compositional strategies and esoteric theories; he remained an outsider, however. Other Austrian composers who are counted among the innovators of this time (e.g. Alexander von Zemlinsky, Franz Schreker, Johanna Müller-Hermann, Max Brand), were forced into exile in the 1930s and were only partially able to continue their careers abroad. In the secondary literature, they are therefore sometimes referred to as “the forgotten avant-garde”.