Josef Matthias Hauer and the Logos

There have been many instances in the history of science when a discovery is made independently by two different people at close to the same time. The simultaneous invention of the telephone by Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell is one of the most famous cases. The independent development of calculus, or the mathematical study of continuous change, by polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and alchemist Isaac Newton was another case in point, and one relevant to the line of inquiry being developed here. The simultaneous discovery and adoption of new artistic techniques is less documented but it does still occur. The development of twelve tone “dodecaphonic” music was conceived by two different composers independently of one another, first by Josef Matthias Hauer with his “law of the twelve tones” in 1919, four years before Arnold Schoenberg’s put forth his twelve-tone technique, though Schoenberg claims to have made his initial discovery in 1921. 

            It is Schoenberg who often gets the praise (or the blame, depending on a listeners point of view) for giving (or inflicting) twelve tone music on the world. His less famous contemporary, Josef Matthias Hauer receives little credit in comparison for his own contributions to music theory and practice, even though he was technically first on the scene in creating his method for composing using all twelve notes of the chromatic scale. Hauer was more of a hermetic and solitary figure who did not gather around him the large circle of disciples to promulgate his theory the way that Schoenberg had, even though he did have friends and students, and hung out in cafes discussing culture. Schoenberg’s branch of twelve-tone technique will be referenced throughout this series of posts as others adapted his system to their own ends, but the work of Hauer is of more immediate concern, because it is highly likely that he became a model for the brief, though pivotal, character of Joculator Basiliensis in Herman Hesse’s Glass Bead Game.

            Josef Hauer was born in Austria in 1883, and his parents lived inside an old monastery where a school was housed. Hauer was eager to learn and by the age five he wanted to go to school, but he was still too young. He begged his parents to send him to school, but they didn’t. To placate him, his father bought his son a zither. He took to the instrument quickly, writing “soon I could tune the instrument, and had learned to recognize the circle of fourths and fifths, the keys and their accidentals. This so impressed me, that one day I, too, attempted to transcribe for zither a piece which I had heard on a barrel-organ.”

It seems the atmosphere of the monastery and school must have impregnated him with the love of learning and spiritual contemplation. In order to make a living Hauer trained to become a school teacher himself at the Wiener Neustadt Teacher's Training College in 1897, but he continued his studies in music with private lessons and gained further movement ahead under the steam of his own ambitions as an autodidact. He devoted himself to the study of harmony, counterpoint and music theory and became a multi-instrumentalist, as he learned to play cello, organ, violin and piano as well as conducting choirs. 

            In 1902 Hauer got his first teaching gig in the small market town of Krumbach and dedicated himself to composing. During his time in this town, he reconnected with Ferdinand Ebner, a friend from his hometown of of Wiener Neudstadt, whom he happened to spot while on a train. It was 1904 and both were on their way to Vienna to take their teachers exams. Ebner was another brilliant mind who became well known as a philosopher, theologian and poet and the two men developed a close friendship.

Hauer taught in grammar school in the town of Krumbach for a little while. He had met his wife, Leopoldine Hönig at Krumbach and the pair were married in 1907 going on to have three children together. After passing another test he was able to able to start teaching school back in Wiener Neustadt and the couple moved to his hometown with their young family. When Ebner moved to the nearby town of Gablitz it became easy for them to keep up their friendship.  

Hauer and Ebner were both born within a year of each other, and around this time they were 28 years old. They both became involved in something of an intellectual and artistic salon that met at the Café Lehn in Wiener Neustadt. This was to prove to be a fortuitous time for Hauer, and his personality and strong views about music began to exert a gravitational force at these meetings, becoming a focal point of attention. Stimulated in this atmosphere his ideas started to take on a more cohesive form, and his first dissonant pieces were composed and performed. Ebner and the others encouraged him to continue, and Hauer later recalled that he had a feeling of rebirth in the twenty-eighth year of his life, making the music he had first perceived in dreams, become manifest in reality.

This is the period when he composed early works such as Nomos I and Apokalyptische Phantasie. Their reception was mixed among the public and panned by critics, but he did not let this flag his spirits and he continued on with his work.

It seems that deep subjects and questions regarding philosophy and metaphysics came naturally to him. His earliest surviving composition is “Tragödien des Sophokles,” a piano piece from 1911 that took the Greek playwright Sophocles tragedies as theme. He also had a strong love of the German Romantics. Ebner had brought his attention to the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin, and he began to work on the Hölderlin-Lieder, setting some poems to music.

While still in the service he moved his family to Vienna in 1915. After he was discharged from active duty in 1918, he taught school again very briefly, but by the next year had decided to retire and live on a small pension. In this respect he was well acquainted with the artists life and he and his family remained down at heels. He was offered a position to perform in the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, but turned it down. It makes one wonder what effects being in the war had on him, and he had already had somewhat ill health. 
In Vienna he came to know Adolf Loos, an architect and writer most famous as part of the Vienna Secessionist movement of architecture. Loos is famous for his design of Villa Müller which embodied his idea of the Raumplan, or spatial plan, method for arranging interior spaces. Loos [later?] brought Hauer into contact with the circle of Arnold Schoenberg.

Looshaus, a central building in the school of Viennese Modernism

​In the meantime Hauer had found inspiration for his first work on music theory based on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Theory of Colours while working with Ebner as a copyist for his friends first major work of philosophical theology. 

Ferdinand Ebner

The I, The Thou, and the Logos
 
            It is no secret that Hauer held serious metaphysical and spiritual views. These ideas fed directly into his compositions and his writings about music and aesthetics. One of the key influences on Hauer was the philosopher Ferdinand Ebner, who he encountered in the cultural ferment that had bubbled up in Vienna in the aftermath of World War I. Ebner expounded a “philosophy of dialogue” centered on humanity existing in an “I-Thou” personal relationship with God.  Ebner articulated this philosophical theology in his work Das Wort und Die Geistigen Realitäten: Pneumatologische Fragmente (The Word and the Spiritual Realities: Pneumatological Fragments) from 1921. Ebner’s work became an influence on Martin Buber who drew on Ebner’s insight for his work I and Thou published in 1923.  Hauer was a friend of Ebner’s and copied out the The Word and the Spiritual Realities for publication, coming to know and understand it intimately. Ebner’s work ended up being one of the seeds that sprouted into his twelve-tone theory. Hauer was not just on an aesthetic quest, but on a spiritual quest.
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            In Ebner’s theology the “word” is on the one hand, the spoken utterances used as language to communicate between one person and another person (I and Thou). On the other had he considers the I and Thou relationship to be a manifestation of “geistige Relitaten” or mental/spiritual realities. Ebner links this thought to the Bible where in the Gospel of John it is written that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” In other words, Ebner’s Christianity is orientated towards the Logos, which in Greek philosophy concerned the idea of a universal mind of divine reason that can be considered the mind of God.

            To get deeper into the idea of the Logos it will be helpful to have a brief history of the idea of the Logos in western philosophical and religious thought.

            Before the word Logos was used by the apostle John, it had been used by Pythagoras. Also like the Christians, Pythagoras believed in the primacy of the number three, but instead of it being the trinity of God, Son, and Holy Spirit, he taught of the Monad, Dyad and Harmony. These three principles formed the basic structure of the cosmos. The Monad, or the One, represented the Supreme Being of the universe. The Monad begat the Dyad, representing the principle of otherness and diversification. From the Dyad come the multiplicity of numbers, but in these numbers there can be found Harmony, as relates to the proportions between numbers (and extrapolating from numbers musical notes and geometrical shapes). In Pythagorean thought, Harmony is based on the idea of logos, which creates a unity between the Monad and the Dyad.

            In the Greek language the word logos has two meanings, mind and rationality. It can therefore be thought of in two distinct ways, but like the Monad and the Dyad, there is a Harmony between them. (Gottfried Leibniz was another thinker who used the Monad as the basis for a system of metaphysics and philosophy. His Monadology will be explored at later time.)

            From the Pythagorean’s the logos went on to inform the philosophy of Heraclitus and from there went into the work of Plato, and from there seeped into Aristotle and went on down the line of the Western tradition finding culmination as a key religious principle of Christianity.

            Heraclitus was a Greek philosopher from Ephesus (in present day Turkey) who is best known for his enigmatic and paradoxical writings that only now exist in fragmentary form. Germane to the present discussion is his notion that everything is always in a state of flux. His teaching has come down to us paraphrased as the statement that “no one ever steps in the same river twice.” The idea here is not that everything is in such a state of flux that things do not hold their shape, or that we would not recognize our wives or children. The idea is actually much closer to those of modern physics. The atoms that make up a river are constantly changing, but the river itself remains constant. The changes in its contours are hard to see on the human time scale. Thus, the more things change the more they stay the same. Discounting the experience of aging, our perceptions of our bodies are relatively the same, even as the processes that keep them alive continue to bring in and expel various elemental forces.  

            This leads to another concept from Heraclitus, that of the unity of opposites. The following is typical of his gnomic expressions, “As the same thing in us are living and dead, waking and sleeping, young and old. For these things having changed around are those, and those in turn having changed around are these.” Things that seem to be opposed often have more in common than not, and reveal hidden unities. As much as things are changing, they all can be traced back to the one, to the Monad. “Having harkened not to me but to the Word (Logos) it is wise to agree that all things are one.”

            The Logos, or Word, can be thought of then, as an expression of the Monad.

            In Taoist terms this can be thought of as the Eternal. Change is constant. Everything is always in flux. This is one thing we can count on. For Heraclitus the Logos was a unifying principle that structured and ordered the constantly changing cosmos. 

            The Logos became an important concept in the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. Plato had an understanding of Logos as that which enabled a thinker to convey with accuracy what they actually know. For Aristotle Logos was related to the human capacity for reason and rationality. Indeed, for him the word was closely related to ratio, where we get our word rationality. It would seem then that rationality is related to the mathematical or geometrical concept of ratio. The Latin word means reckoning, or how we estimate and calculate, as a way of knowledge.

            The Stoics also came to use the word Logos. Marcus Aurelius was inclined to “always think of the universe as one living organism, with a single substance and a single soul.” This single soul is of course the Logos (and again due to its singularity, could be related to the Monad). The Stoics believed that Logos permeated everything in the manifest universe, while at the same transcending everything in the known universe. This meant it took on aspects of divinity, while at the same time divinity took on the aspect of everything, allowing us to know the divine. It was, for them, the principle of reason and rationality guiding the unfolding of the cosmos. Since it was manifest in all things in the macrocosm, it was also manifest in the life of the individual as the microcosm.

            The founding father of the Stoic school of philosophy, Zeno of Citium said that, “God is not separate from the world; He is the soul of the world, and each of us contains a part of the Divine Fire. All things are parts of one single system, which is called Nature.”

            The Stoics believed in an interior or inner logos, and exterior or outer logos. These again can be thought of in terms of macrocosm and microcosm. The inner logos being the one inside each of us, available to offer guidance, the outer logos being the macrocosmic all of divinity, omniscient and all knowing.

            The idea that the one and the many interpenetrate each other is one way to make sense of the idea of how oracles work. All of the symbols within a coherent system become a language through which the divine can speak. It becomes a tool for communication and a bridge between the inner logos and the outer logos.

            All of this talk of Logos and the changing and the unchanging relates directly to Hauer’s idea of the Continuum, which also had some echoes of Ferdinand Ebner’s philosophy. Hauer used the I Ching as a means for composing his Zwolftonspiele pieces. It was his way of getting out of his own way, and allowing the divine to come through so he could express something beyond himself. John Cage would go on to embrace a very similar philosophical point of view in his own music.     

            To relate all this back to Ferdinand Ebner, he thought that humanities ability to speak was a key component of our human existence and that the “word” was a divine gift. Language itself is exemplary of the “I and Thou” relationship between humans, and between humans and God. Since in Christianity, Jesus Christ is considered to be the Logos, we are able to communicate to God via Christ, the human Thou. 

​            Ebner rejected Renes Descartes idea that “I think therefore I am,” because in his view, the human I is not to be found in solitary reflection, but can only be experienced in relationship. This gave what might be called a strong anti-individualist cast to Ebner’s ideas about the role of artists in society.

Ebner wrote that, “Man has his true spiritual life in the relation of the I to the Thou, in the realization of this relation; true spiritual life cannot be found where it is sought the most willingly: it cannot be found in poetry and art, philosophy and mythical religion where he dreams about spirit - even if he does this in the most ingenious, most brilliant way. Every form of culture have never been and will never be anything else than a dream about spirit, dreamt by man in the I-loneliness of his existence, far from the spiritual realities of life.” (
          
  In other words, Ebner believed that the works of man could never equal the works of God. Artists who claimed they were vehicles for the expression of divinity were fooling themselves. They could only ever be expressing their own mortal egos. Josef Hauer picked up on this idea from Ebner, and it he came to believe that a composer should be a blank slate. The author John Covach wrote of that
Hauer thought that  “music should arise through a composer in the most unmediated manner possible, and when he hit upon the principle of constantly and systematically circulating all twelve notes, he believed he had discovered the realm in which music could transcend the personal and attain the spiritual.”

            For Ebner eternity was always accessible in the present through prayer, where the I-Thou relationship is practiced in conversation with God.
           
Josef Hauer developed his own way for interacting with the divine, that was just as much an I-Thou relationship and ongoing conversation as was Ferdinand’s devout and prayerful way.  Hauer used his Law of the Twelve Tones, and later chance operations and aleatoric procedures involving the I-Ching, to allow the all permeating Logos to be expressed through a composition. This keyed him in to another of Ebner’s ideas as he was able to bypass his conscious mind and ego from composing and allow the expression of these greater spiritual realities to come through him.

            Lauriejean Reinhardt wrote in their notes for a composition of Hauer’s contained in The Moldenhauer Archives at the Library of Congress that:
           
            According to Hauer, atonal (i.e., twelve-tone) music was not invented (erfunden) but rather "perceived" ("gehört"). The atonal musician was not an active agent--neither a music maker (Musikmacher) nor a performer (Musikant) or "original genius" ("Originalgenie")--but a passive "hearer" ("Hörender"), one who "perceives that which is unchanging, intangible, the eternal in the essence of things ("Tao")." Compositions were regarded as a Sphärenmusik that provided a path to self-discovery, and the creative process was likened to a cosmic game, with certain elements left to chance.
 
            So if twelve-tone music wasn’t invented, but perceived -who perceived it first, Josef Hauer or Arnold Schoenberg? To get into that, we will have to look at Schoenberg’s parallel development as another Viennese composer of the same generation who also perceived twelve-tone music that seeded the work of the serialist composers who followed.