Introduction

The book begins by noting the problematic historiographic and music-analytic status of music in the ‘aphoristic style’, extremely short and concentrated compositions written by the Second Viennese School between 1909 and 1914. Four pervasive myths are identified: 1) sui generis piece-contextuality, 2) athematicism, 3) stylistic transience, and 4) large-scale structural bankruptcy. These problems were purportedly resolved only by a wholehearted turn away from concision to text-setting, and later by the twelve-note systematisation of the 1920s. The author introduces their general contention that such myths are not only unhelpful for appreciation of the aphoristic corpus but also in several senses untrue. The three-part structure of the book is summarised. After some preliminary historical context (Chapter 1), an intensive close reading of Webern's Lost Cello Sonata (1914) (Chapters 2–3) is followed by the generalisation of a harmonic lexicon for early post-tonal music (Chapter 4). Subsequently, a final section (Chapter 5) functions as a humanising conclusion in which the historical, analytical, and theoretical impulses of the book unify to offer an alternative portrait of vulnerability for three of musical modernism's most notable figureheads.