Through the '80s Anton Webern's name kept cropping up for me in disparate places. Paul Griffiths' A Guide to Electronic Music mentions him as one of the people who laid the foundations that made electronic music possible. Webern's orchestral pieces, wrote Griffiths, "implied a kind of adventurousness which might find the electronic medium, with its greatly enlarged variety of sounds, a fruitful field." His name was also frequently mentioned by, or in connection with, Frank Zappa. And then there are the curious references to Webern — which you can read here — in Gravity's Rainbow. The latter in particular would have piqued my curiosity.
I think I started my exploration of Webern's music, and this was the wrong place to start. Mainly because I just can't get on with the whole lieder style (unless perhaps it's done by Dagmar Krause).
More generally, I simply don't have the music history education to understand what makes Webern's music so special.
In common with Cornelius Cardew and Albert Ayler, Webern met an untimely death at the hands of another — demonstrating that a career as a radical composer is truly a high risk occupation.
 MusicBrainz entry for this album
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