The Path to the New Note: Interval Distributions in the Music of Anton Webern

Abstract

Intervals, the distances between notes, are a common topic in the analysis of post-tonal music, and this is certainly true with regard to the music of Anton Webern. There is a lack, however, of rigorous empirical analysis of this aspect of Webern’s music, especially on a large scale. Scholarship has instead tended to rest on unfounded assertions or localised phenomena, which cannot necessarily be generalised. This paper is a corpus study of Webern’s 31 works with Opus numbers, using music21 to analyse the interval distributions across the corpus and interrogate commonly-held assumptions about Webern’s music. In particular, this study traces changes in his intervallic language across his body of work, assesses the relationship between rows and the resulting dodecaphonic music, and considers the integration of his harmonic language from the perspective of correlations between vertical and linear intervallic content.