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Which musical features define Anton Webern's aphoristic period?
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Anton Webern
Anton von Webern, 1940.
During his "aphoristic" period (roughly 1908–1914), Anton Webern developed a highly distinct musical style characterized by the following features:
- Extreme Conciseness: Webern focused on compressing the highest intensity of expression into the greatest possible formal brevity.1
- Atonality: These works moved away from a fixed tonal center, reflecting the revolutionary shift toward atonality pioneered by the Second Viennese school.12
- Fragmented Texture: His style featured melodic and harmonic fragmentation, often utilizing wide intervallic leaps.1
- Ascetic Sparseness: The texture of his music during this time is noted for its extreme sparseness and economy of means.1
- Innovative Use of Dissonance and Timbre: He employed unusual combinations of dissonance and instrumental colors to achieve his unique sound.1
These characteristics, which also include pointillistic elements, marked a significant departure from the opulence of the late Romantic era. Notable works from this period include his Five Movements for String Quartet (1909) and Six Bagatelles for String Quartet (1911–13).1