of the tempered scale equally, without favouring individual tones, seems to have occupied various composers in the first two decades of the 20th century, who simultaneously, but independently of Schönberg, advanced to similarly bold results. Among these experimenters, in whose works twelve-tone and serial approaches can be discerned, is first of all Josef Matthias Hauer, who publicly argued with Schönberg about the "copyright" to twelve-tone music. Also to be mentioned is Alexander Scriabin, whose atonal sound-centre technique, based on quartal layering, subsequently paved the way for remarkable experiments by a whole generation of young Russian composers. The significance of this generation of composers for New Music, which emerged in the climate of the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, could only penetrate into consciousness in the second half of the century, as they were already systematically eliminated by the Stalinist dictatorship in the late 1920s. Here, Nikolai Roslavets, Arthur Lourié, Alexander Mossolov and Ivan Vyshnegradsky should be mentioned as representatives. A major shortcoming of the abandonment of major-minor tonality, however, was the extensive loss of the form-forming forces of this harmonic system. Composers countered this deficiency in very different ways. In order to avoid the classical-romantic musical forms, they now chose for the new music partly free (rhapsody, fantasy), or neutral (concert, orchestral piece) designations, or self-chosen, sometimes extremely short, aphoristic forms (Webern, Schönberg). Others adhered to traditional forms, even though their works themselves took this concept ad absurdum, or filled the traditional ideas of form with new content (Scriabin's single-movement piano sonatas, Schoenberg's sonata forms with the abandonment of the tonality that founded them in the first place). Even the fundamental idea of a continuous, purposeful processing of musical thoughts within a work loses its primacy, parallel to the loss of the 19th century's belief in progress. New possibilities of shaping form, beyond parameters of music, which had previously been treated rather stepmotherly, such as timbre, rhythm, dynamics, systematic resp. Free montage techniques in Igor Stravinsky or Charles Ives, the rejection of the time directionality of music, as well as an increasing individualism claim their place. A musical source whose potential was also used for experimentation is folklore. While previous generations of composers had repeatedly chosen exotic subjects in order to legitimise structures that deviated from the prevailing rules of composition, it was in the work of Claude Debussy that a stylistic and structural adaptation of javanese gamelan music, which