Josef Matthias Hauer was the early-20th-century Austrian atonal composer who wasn’t Arnold Schoenberg. At one stage the two were chummy enough to consider collaborating on a textbook about atonal composition but, as Steffen Schleiermacher’s scene-setting booklet-notes remind us, they were soon locked into a furious ideological ruck about who actually ‘invented’ 12-tone composition. But you do wonder how the two men could ever have collaborated on anything, listening to Hauer’s 1923 Piano Etudes. Atonality for Schoenberg was all about liberating gestures from Romantic archetypes; even when he evoked ‘classical’ models, his methods put clear distance between himself and his source. Schoenberg manipulated tone rows; Hauer’s atonal music was based on symmetrically organised chords. Where Schoenberg needed to be pushed far outside his comfort zone as creative necessity, there is something prosaic about Hauer’s system – a prop to lean on whenever inspiration is failing.

And for pieces meant to be atonal, these Etudes sound clumsily tonal. The zig-zag of his melodic lines slinks lazily against harmonically declawed cadence points; and once a line has established itself, Hauer simply transposes it over another tonal centre. Which works fine until he chances upon an intriguingly insolvable chromatic riddle in Etude No 5 – think Satie’s Vexations – and is obliged to take a view on where his material might go. Then Hauer bottles it. His system lacks flexibility to embrace the unexpected.

Anything illuminating that interim period in music history when, just for a moment, fundamental truths about harmony were up for grabs is of interest, and Hauer does make you appreciate Schoenberg’s expressive and technical genius all the more. Schleiermacher’s neutral detachment – he doesn’t attempt to fashion Hauer’s melodies into neat phrases – is appropriate; although, by letting his lines go for a walk, Schleiermacher inadvertently reveals Hauer’s tendency to plod.