René Leibowitz, Sonate pour flûte et piano, Op. 12a (1944)

The variety of paths and direction that are being pursued by the younger generation today would seem to justify asking whether a further development of twelvetone music is possible, or whether the methods used by Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern have been completely exhausted. In a conversation with the composer René Leibowtiz, who has been promoting twelvetone music in Schoenberg s style in France since 1937 and is now th leader of the dodecaphonic composers in Paris, the composer addressed this question. For René Leibowitz, Arnold Schoenberg is a great genius of a composer of the sort that appears only once in a century. Schoenberg is was the first to achieve clear and precise organization of musical ideas using the means of twelvetone technique and thereby renew largescale form, which had been lacking in atonal music. René Leibowitz rejects attempts to give prominence to Berg or Webern alone, as many composers have done, even though he himself was a student of Webern and has anal