Roberto Gerhard wrote his Wind Quintet (for flute doubling piccolo, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn) in 1928, and conducted the first performance in Barcelona in 1930. At the time of writing it, Gerhard had reached the end of his five years of study with Arnold Schoenberg, whose own gigantic Wind Quintet had appeared just four years previously. Gerhard's Quintet is a short, concentrated work. It is also—at least as far as considerations of its origins and future implications are concerned—rather a complex one. To put it in a wide historical perspective, it stands among the foremost of the first generation of post-Viennese-school serial works. Looking closer, one can see revealed in it—aside from those craftsmanly skills, the mastering of which was the primary task of any Schoenberg pupil—a young composer, alive to many of the possibilities now open to him, possibilities beyond just those pertaining to his teacher's more revolutionary ideas, and at the same time perhaps uncertain which general direction to take.