The impression was bizarre enough. The inner balcony, the ‘Pawlatsche’ – as it is called in Vienna – continued around the courtyard of an old Josefstadt house. Chickens were making noise below, dry wash was fluttering in the June breeze. I knocked at a white door. It opened, and before me there stood an old Chinese sage in his long nightshirt. It was Hauer. He had a white Vandyke beard. ‘I’ve already been waiting quite a while for you’, he said without any surprise. Then he asked me in, got back into bed, and spoke with deep bitterness about Thomas Mann, Darmstadt and Theodor Adorno. With every word it became clearer to me that here the excess pressure of a volcano brought to the point of eruption by increasing isolation was venting itself. But the strangeness of this man had traces of prophecy about it… The compositions that he showed me were very similar. They all began with the major 7th chord, usually with b flat-d-f-a, and also concluded with it. Most of the pieces were piano duets or string quartets. ‘Do take it with you if you want to read it’, Hauer said. I did not want to take the responsibility upon myself. ‘What do you mean?’, he wanted to know. ‘When you’ve read it, just throw it away. I write something new every day.’ So I took the little bundle of these curious scores along with me.

The starting point of a ‘Zwölftonspiel’ is not a single tone but a sequence of tones. The equality of the twelve tones on the basis of equal temperament leads to the twelve-tone-law, the nomos: within a major seventh each tone occurs exactly once. There are 479,001,600 possible arrangements of the twelve tones, surveyable in a system of 44 tropes or scales. The tropes represent interval complexes of two six-tone halves; twelve-tone sequences with kindred interval relationships can be said to belong to the same tropes. The 479,001,600 melodic possibilities can therefore be divided into precisely 44 categories or modes. Once a possible melodic order has been selected (twelve-tone cycle), the application of its own organic musical laws as a sort of ‘rule of the game’ produces a four-part harmonic band or continuum. This is a sequence of 12 four-tone chords, which differ from one to the next by a single tone. Each newly entering tone is the ‘twelve-tone’, a tone from the twelve-tone sequence which is which is the basis of the continuum. From the closed circle of the continuum, dispositions can be drawn according to certain principles. The qualitative differentiation of the tones of the four-note chords forms the basis of the ‘playing rules’. The disposition can be as follows: Monophony in five different rhythmic species. Species one to four correspond to the disposition of one to all four of the four-tone chords. The fifth species (in mixed rhythmic values) is a disposition of constantly differing numbers of tones per four-tone chord, depending on its internal structure. Diaphony in constant contrary motion. Paraphony in constant parallel motion. Metaphony monophony spatially divided as a hocket-like two-part texture. Polyphony: The polyphonic disposition is based on the melic design, a web of parts (texture) written in the continuum. For the textures there are also various rhythmically differentiated forms, as well as a principal-texture determined by the progression of a (monophonic) principal part. The terminology for these various principles was developed by Professor Victor Sokolowski (1911 – 1982). He was the Hauer pupil who as harpsichordist played ‘Zwölftonspiele’ for the first time in public in 1946. In those performances and in the organization of the didactics of the ‘Zwölftonspiel’ (courses, radio studio recordings, LP recordings) he found his life’s work. For the interpretation of the ‘Zwölftonspiele’, the following may serve as a guideline for the execution of the structure of the progression of the four-tone chords in the harmonic band of the continuum: every disposition can be traced back to the harmony, the four-tone chord, and the sequence of four-tone chords can be traced back to the original twelve-tone cycle. (Pedal from four-tone chord to four-tone chord!) The tempo is regulated by the pulse beat: one four-tone chord normally corresponds to one pulse unit (and that approximately to the metronome figure 72). Lastly, let Hauer’s dictum stand for the total concept: ‘…not too fast, not too slow, not too loud, not too soft; well tempered, well intoned!’

Josef Matthias Hauer as "an old sage"