The Perception of Frozen Intervals in Anton Webern’s Concerto for Nine Instruments, Op. 24, Third Movement

Many have described twelve-tone music as difficult to aurally comprehend (e.g., Huron, 2006; Meyer, 1967). This study addresses such claims by investigating what listeners can implicitly learn when hearing a recording of a twelve-tone composition. Krumhansl (1990) has argued that listeners unfamiliar with a musical style attune to the distribution of pitch occurrences, with the most frequent pitch providing a reference point. However, in Anton Webern’s Concerto for Nine Instruments, Op. 24/iii, each pitch occurs nearly the same number of times. Because the distribution of pitches in this twelve-tone work is flat, this study investigates whether listeners instead perceive its recurring intervals. After passive exposure to the composition, musician participants (n = 12) with no formal training in non-tonal music theory demonstrated learning of the frequent intervals (and pairs of intervals) in both forced-choice and ratings tasks. Nonmusicians (n = 13) did not. I then use these empirical findings to inform an interval-based analytical approach to Webern’s compositions.