Apart from his compositions, Cerha widely earned a reputation as an interpreter of the works of Alban Berg, Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern; his affinity for the works of the second Viennese school culminated in the completion of Alban Berg's opera Lulu by finishing the instrumentation of the 3rd act and filling the gaps in the score (premiered by Pierre Boulez in Paris, 1979).
This re-awoke his interest in the music of composers such as Anton Webern, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez, whom he had studied as part of his course.
Anton Chekhov | Anton Corbijn | Anton Bruckner | Anton Webern | Anton Reichenow | Robert Anton Wilson | Anton LaVey | Anton Yelchin | Anton Geesink | Anton Armstrong | Case Anton | Anton Zeilinger | Anton Walbrook | Anton Emdin | Anton du Beke | Anton Denikin | Anton Cermak | Anton | Theodor Anton Ippen | Suzanne Anton | Karl Theodor Anton Maria von Dalberg | Anton van Wilderode | Anton Shkaplerov | Anton R. Valukas | Anton Raphael Mengs | Anton Karas | Anton Günther II | Antón García Abril | Anton Diabelli | Anton Christian Bang |
He accepted a commission to realise the first major Australian electronic work for the 1968 Adelaide Arts Festival, and conducted performances in Melbourne of works by 20th-century composers Stockhausen, Berio and Webern.
George Perle (1990) has argued that this amounts to "Tradition in 20th Century Music", the most significant element of which is the "shared premise of the harmonic equivalence of inversionally symmetrical pitch-class relations," among composers such as Edgard Varèse, Alban Berg, Béla Bartók, Arnold Schoenberg, Alexander Scriabin, Igor Stravinsky, Anton Webern, and himself.
Cyclic tonal progressions in the works of Romantic composers such as Gustav Mahler and Richard Wagner form a link with the cyclic pitch successions in the atonal music of Modernists such as Béla Bartók, Alexander Scriabin, Edgard Varèse, and the Second Viennese School (Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern).
Numerous works were written for them by composers including Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Arnold Schoenberg, and Béla Bartók.
The LaSalle Quartet was best known for its espousal of the Second Viennese School of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, and of the European modernists who derived from that tradition, though they also performed standard classical and romantic literature.
Pollini is especially noted for his performances of Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Schumann, Brahms, Schoenberg, Webern and for championing modern composers such as Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Giacomo Manzoni, Salvatore Sciarrino and Bruno Maderna.
In the 20th century, composers have also written for more varied groups, with Anton Webern's Quartet, opus 22 (1930), for example, being for piano, violin, clarinet and tenor saxophone, and Paul Hindemith's quartet (1938) as well as Olivier Messiaen's Quatuor pour la fin du temps (1940) both for piano, violin, cello and clarinet.
Arnold Schoenberg and his pupil Anton Webern proposed a theory on the emancipation of the dissonance to help analyse the general trend and, in particular, their own atonal music.
The Death of a Composer: Rosa – A Horse Drama is a 1993-94 opera by Louis Andriessen on a libretto by Peter Greenaway, the sixth libretto in Greenaway's Death of a Composer series that explores the deaths of ten 20th-century composers from Anton Webern to John Lennon.
The composers of the Second Viennese School also produced several prominent concertos: Alban Berg's Chamber Concerto for piano, violin, and 13 winds (1923–25), not fully serial but incorporating many elements of Arnold Schoenberg's new system; Anton Webern's Concerto for nine instruments (1931–34), originally intended as a piano concerto; Berg's important Violin Concerto (1935); and Schoenberg's own Violin Concerto (1935–36) and Piano Concerto (1942).
Inspired both by American free jazz and by the radical, abstract music of AMM, as well as influences as diverse as Anton Webern and Samuel Beckett (two Stevens touchstones), the SME kept at least a measure of jazz in their sound, though this became less audible in the later "string" ensembles.