Concerto for Nine Instruments (Webern)

Anton Webern's Concerto for Nine Instruments, Op. 24 (German: Konzert für neun Instrumente), written in 1934, is a twelve-tone concerto for nine instruments: flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, trumpet, trombone, violin, viola, and piano. It consists of three movements:

The concerto is based on a derived row, "often cited [such as by Milton Babbitt (1972)] as a paragon of symmetrical construction". The tone row is shown below.

In the words of Luigi Dallapiccola, the concerto is "a work of incredible conciseness... and of unique concentration... . Although I did not understand the work completely, I had the feeling of finding an aesthetic and stylistic unity as great as I could wish for. [Prague, September 5, 1935]".

The second movement "limits quite severely the values of many domains," for example featuring "only two durational values (quarter and half note[s])," and, partly as a result, "features great uniformity in texture and gesture".

The tone row may be interpreted as: 019, 2te, 367, 458.

The opening displays "[the Concerto's] distinctive trichordal structuring," four of which "comprise an aggregate," or partition. "The six combinations of [the partition's] trichords generate three pairs of complementary hexachords". "Webern takes full advantage of this property [its fourfold degree of symmetry] in the Concerto," that under four appropriate transformations (T₀T₆I₅I_B), the tone row maintains its unordered trichords (j=019,091,etc., k=2te, l=367, and m=458). The hexachord featured is sometimes called the 'Ode-to-Napoleon' hexachord (014589).

According to Brian Alegant, "[t]he Latin square... clearly shows the built in redundancy of [the] partition," four, and, "needless to say, Webern takes full advantage of this property in the Concerto":

j	k	l	m
l	m	j	k
m	l	k	j
k	j	m	l

For example, I₅ = 548, 376, 2et, 109.