Thematic Units and Developments. On the Persistence of ‘Organic Form’ in Chamber Music Between 1910 and 1930

Abstract

The Formenlehre (theory of the musical form), inaugurated by Adolf Bernhard Marx after Beethoven's death and witnessed by several treatises at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, has left traces in the writings and works of Béla Bartók, Alban Berg, Paul Hindemith, Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern. Chamber music (especially string quartets) is the area in which the dialogue with the past is most tangible. The adoption of traditional concepts is associated with significant changes of thematic structures and developmental techniques. Thus, the transformations of the harmonic thinking are paralleled by the way the composers dealt with phrase organisation and syntactic functions.