Berg's Path to Twelve-Note Composition

Writings on Berg's twelve-note music have illuminated the idiosyncratic techniques of construction and derivation operating among multiple rows within a single composition. The roots of Berg's approach to the twelve notes have been traced to aggregate formations appearing in the pretwelve-note works, such as the theme based on diverging ('wedge'-like) chromatic lines in Song 1 of the Altenberg Lieder, Op. 4, the twelve-pitchclass verticality in Song 3 of the same work, and several important aggregate orderings, including the passacaglia theme of Act I/4, in Wozzeck.' In his twelve-note music, familiar constructive features include the symmetry and intervallic saturation of the primary row in the Lyric Suite and 'tonal' aspects of the primary rows of Der Wein, Lulu and the Violin Concerto.2 Berg's techniques of deriving secondary rows, and of integrating such techniques into his compositional language, are based on well-documented methods of pitch-class redistribution, such as the rearrangement within hexachords in the Lyric Suite and the extraction of regularly spaced order positions in Lulu.3 There is more to say, however, about the early history of Berg's twelvenote practices and in particular about the Chamber Concerto, a transitional work composed in the period following Wozzeck and preceding Berg's first extensive engagement with the twelve-note method in the second version of the song 'Schliesse mir die Augen beide' and the Lyric Suite.4 The scoring and concept of the Concerto are reminiscent of Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony, Op. 9, and Berg dedicated the Concerto to his mentor and made frequent musical and symbolic references to both Schoenberg and Webern throughout the score. Some of the references are explained in a dedicatory letter to Schoenberg, including a mention of 'passages that correspond to the laws set up by you for composition with twelve tones related only to one another'.' Basic features of such passages have been recognized by Jarman, who considers the Concerto 'a bridge between Berg's earlier [aggregate-handling] techniques and those employed in the later twelve-note music',6 and by

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