A Heretic in the Schoenberg Circle: Roberto Gerhard's First Engagement with Twelve-Tone Procedures in Andantino

Shortly before finishing his studies with Arnold Schoenberg, Roberto Gerhard composed Andantino, a short piece in which he used for the first time a compositional technique for the systematic circulation of all pitch classes in both the melodic and the harmonic dimensions of the music. He modelled this technique on the tri-tetrachordal procedure in Schoenberg's Prelude from the Suite for Piano, Op. 25 but, unlike his teacher, Gerhard treated the tetrachords as internally unordered pitch-class collections. This decision was possibly encouraged by his exposure from the mid-1920s onwards to Josef Matthias Hauer's writings on 'trope theory'. Although rarely discussed by scholars, Andantino occupies a special place in Gerhard's creative output for being his first attempt at 'twelve-tone composition' and foreshadowing the permutation techniques that would become a distinctive feature of his later serial compositions. This article analyses Andantino within the context of the early history of twelve-tone music and theory.