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 harmonic devices, and ternary form are used to argue that as the harmonies of the aphoristic corpus look into the future, other features simultaneously wrestle such works into an imagined primordial musical past.

This book will be of interest to music theorists, historians of the long-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, undergraduate and postgraduate students, and all those intrigued by the relationship between music theory and musical style in the age of the ‘emancipation of dissonance’.