Webern, Ives, and Bartk[edit]

For Anton Webern, the importance of quartal harmony lay in the possibility of building new
sounds. After hearing Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony, Webern wrote "You must write
something like that, too!" (Webern 1963, 48; "So was mut du auch machen!"[citation needed]) Shortly
after, he wrote his Four Pieces for Violin and Piano Op. 7, using quartal harmony as a formal
principle, which was also used in later works.[citation needed]

Introduction to Ives's "The Cage", 114 Songs (Reisberg 1975, 345).

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Uninfluenced by the theoretical and practical work of the Second Viennese School, the
American Charles Ives meanwhile wrote in 1906 a song called "The Cage" (No. 64 of his
collection, 114 songs), in which the piano part contained four-part fourth chords accompanying
a vocal line which moves in whole tones.[citation needed]
Other 20th-century composers, like Bla Bartk with his piano work Mikrokosmos and Music
for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, as well asPaul Hindemith, Carl Orf and Igor Stravinsky,
employed quartal harmony in their work. These composers joined Romantic elements with
Baroque music, folk songs and their peculiar rhythm and harmony with the open harmony of
fourths and fifths.[citation needed]

Fourths in Bla Bartk's Mikrokosmos V, No. 131, Fourths (Quartes)

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Hindemith[edit]

Fourth and fifth writing in the second movement of Paul Hindemith's Mathis der Maler

Hindemith constructed large parts of his symphonic work Symphony: Mathis der Maler by
means of fourth and fifth intervals. These steps are a restructuring of fourth chords (C D G
becomes the fourth chord D G C), or other mixtures of fourths and fifths (D A D
G C in measure 3 of the example). Hindemith was, however, not a proponent of an explicit
quartal harmony. In his 1937 writing Unterweisung im Tonsatz (The Craft of Musical
Composition, Hindemith 1937), he wrote that "notes have a family of relationships, that are the
bindings of tonality, in which the ranking of intervals is unambiguous," so much so, indeed, that
in the art of triadic composition "...the musician is bound by this, as the painter to his primary
colours, the architect to the three dimensions." He lined up the harmonic and melodic aspects
of music in a row in which the octave ranks first, then the fifth and the third, and then the fourth.
"The strongest and most unique harmonic interval after the octave is the fifth, the prettiest
nevertheless is the third by right of the chordal efects of itsCombination tones."