Rhythm and Metre in Webern's Late Works

It is almost self-evident that the relationship between rhythm and metre must vary from one composer to another. Generalization in such matters is difficult and probably ill-advised. But it seems clear that for German/Austrian composers in the first half of this century, who customarily used divisive rhythms set within traditional metres, the interdependence of rhythm and metre was not as critical as it was in the music of composers such as Stravinsky and Bartók, whose typically additive rhythms were notated in those metres – often asymmetrical or constantly changing – that most clearly expressed their natural accents. In most cases the rhythms of a Schoenberg or a Webern, as well as-the choice of metre in which to express them, would seem not to have been intrinsic to the original musical idea in the same way that they were to a Stravinsky or a Bartók (even when folk music was not directly involved). This is not to say that rhythm and metre were not important to the two Viennese composers, but only that their conception seems initially to have been more concerned with pitch sequences and contours than with rhythm and metre, these being things that could be worked out later, as composition progressed. The surviving sketches of Webern, at least, appear to bear out such an assertion

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