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After the end of WW II, Cerha first explored the neo-classicism commonplace in concerts and music education ("Divertimento", written in 1947/1948 and revised in 1954 is a tribute to Stravinsky). Later, the works of Anton Webern and, from 1956 on, the serial techniques used by the Avant-Garde became the starting point for further individual developments in his compositions ("Relazioni fragili", "Espressioni fondamentali", "Intersecazioni").
With "Mouvements", "Fasce" and his concert series "Spiegel" (1960/1961) he created a musical language absolutely free of traditional phrases. It differs from seemingly similar and as well as contemporary, independent compositions by Ligeti or Penderecki, especially in the way that tangible processes of development play a decisive role and create large, formal connections in combination with non-linear processes, changing the entire piece into a coherent system - a kind of cosmos. In the not yet implemented "Welttheater" concept for "Spiegeln", the behavioural patterns of the masses of "human beings", quasi viewed from a space-time distance, correspond to the musical processes in mass structures.
In the stage performance "Netzwerk", based on "Exercises" (1962-1967) - a piece deliberately using heterogenic material, the perspectives between mass reactions and zoomed-in individual areas are alternating. Stylistically and structurally regressive elements break into a purist world of sounds and create a complex environment of chaos and order within an organism which corresponds to the image of a "world as networked system". After a series of instrumental works ("Curriculum", "Sinfonie"), which - in the interest of expanding the material available to Cerha - refer directly to historical idioms, all the structural forms achieved so far are seamlessly interwoven in his opera "Baal" (1974-1980). Now, the individual stands provokingly in the centre of attention, although the panoply reaches from a mirror-like sound pad, standing for something archetypical, to clearly articulated, melodic-harmonic figures, expressing differentiated involvement. In the opera "Der Rattenfänger" he additionally incorporates polyrhythmic structures as leitmotif for commotion and agitation. Picking up his work with different forms of folk music, something already visible in his early works, refers to a stylisation and alienation of the Viennese idiom in some of his smaller works such as 'Keintaten' (named after Ernst Kein) and Chansons (using texts by the Wiener Gruppe, amongst others). In the partly microtonal string-quartets, influences from non-European music support his tendency to polyrhythmic and metric formations. Cherha's interest , forming already in 1962, in dealing with the diversity of today's experiences in complex, musical organisms is again confirmed in his last compositions.
Gertraud Cerha, 1996