Musicatlas
Music
Except for the Canons on Irish Folksongs, virtually all Spinner’s works are composed according to his personal development within the 12-note method. The early works before opus 1 show Bergian and Schoenbergian traits; thereafter the stylistic and textural refinement of his music owes most to Webern, and he contributed mainly to Webernian genres. Yet gesturally and dynamically Spinner is often very distinct from Webern, and he continued to develop the 12-note method in his own terms. The late ‘sonatinas’ (the term was surely ironical) approach something like ‘total serialization’ of rhythm and dynamics as well as pitch, but combined with an intensity and indeed violence of expression that makes them the reverse of mere essays in abstraction. Rather than belonging in any relation to the Darmstadt avant-garde, whose view of music he though fundamentally flawed, Spinner is rather the logical next step after Webern.
He wrote a valuable practical textbook, ‘A Short Introduction to the Technique of Twelve-tone Composition’, published by Boosey & Hawkes in 1960. Because of his connection with Boosey & Hawkes Spinner at least had the majority of his works printed in good editions, but this does not seem to have brought him many performances.
Selected list of works
Orchestra or Chamber Orchestra
- Symphony for small orchestra (1932-33)
- Passacaglia for wind ensemble with violin, cello and piano (c.1934)
- Overture for orchestra (1944; originally intended as op. 4; dedicated to Schoenberg on his 70th birthday)
- Piano Concerto, op. 4 (1947; revised as Concerto for piano and Chamber Orchestra, 1948)
- Overture for orchestra, op. 5 (1948-49; unrelated to previous overture)
- Violin Concerto (1953-55)
- Concerto for Orchestra, op. 12 (1956-57)
- Prelude and Variations, op. 18 (1960-62)
- Ricercata, op. 21 (1964-65)
- Chamber Symphony, op. 28 (1975-79)
Chorus with or without accompaniment
- Ich lieb’ eine Blume for SATB (1936)
- Die Sonne sinkt, cantata after Nietzsche (1952)
- Cantata on poems of Hölderlin, op. 11 (1955-57)
- Six Canons on Irish Folksongs for SATB a cappella (1960-61) (also arranged for chorus and strings)
- Cantata on German Folk Texts, op. 20 (1963-64)
- Irish Folksongs for SATB chorus (1964)
- Schilflieder for SATB chorus, op. 27 (1974-75)
Songs
- 2 Klabund Lieder with piano (c.1935-36)
- 3 Lieder for soprano and piano (Trakl, Brentano, Mörike) (1941)
- 5 Lieder with piano, op. 8 (Nietzsche) (1953)
- 3 Songs for tenor and piano, op. 15 (Blake, Yeats, Lovelace) (1959)
- 3 Lieder for soprano and piano, op. 16 (Rilke) (1960)
- 2 Lieder for soprano and six instruments, op. 24 (Nietzsche, Rilke) (1970-71)
- 5 Lieder for mezzo and piano, op. 25 (1973)
Chamber Music
- String Quartet (1934-35) [at least two previous quartets are lost]
- Trio for clarinet, cello and piano (1935)
- Sonata for violin and piano, op. 1 (1936)
- String Quartet No.1, op. 2 (1941)
- Piano Quintet (1937)
- Trio for clarinet, viola and cello (1940)
- Piano Trio, op. 6 (1950)
- String Quartet No.2, op. 7 (1952)
- Suite for clarinet and piano, op. 10 (1955-56)
- Quintet for clarinet, horn, bassoon, guitar and double-bass, op. 14 (1959; 1963)
- Sonata for clarinet and piano, op. 17 (1961)
- Variations for violin and piano, op. 19 (1962)
- Sonatina for clarinet in D, oboe, bassoon and horn, op. 22 (1971)
- Sonatina for cello and piano, op. 26 (1972-73)
Piano Music
- Sonata, op. 3 (1942-45)
- Fantasy, op. 9 (1953-54)
- Inventions, op. 13 (1958)
- Sonatina, op. 22 (1966-69)
Life
Spinner was of mixed Galizian and Romanian parentage, but was born a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1914 the family moved to Vienna. From 1926 to 1930 he studied with Alban Berg’s pupil Paul Amadeus Pisk. He had several performances, including at ISCM Festivals, and won some notable prizes, but in 1935 he undertook a second course of study, this time with Anton Webern, until 1939. In May 1939 he emigrated to London. In 1940 he moved to Bradford, Yorkshire, where he spent much of the war working in a locomotive factory. After working as a music-copyist, in 1947 he joined the staff of the publishers Boosey & Hawkes in London, as an editor. It is said that he was so meticulous a copy-editor that Stravinsky insisted that all his scores should be proof-read by Spinner. He retired from Boosey & Hawkes in 1975.
Although he maintained a number of contacts with musicians on the continent and in the UK, and he composed steadily, comparatively few performances of Spinner’s works took place and those were often misunderstood as mere epigonism of Webern, and generally speaking this remains the case. The archive of Spinner’s manuscripts is now in the Austrian National Library.