[Early] Modernism in Music
— Some brief background notes
“Make it new!”
The Modernist period in music began in the 1890s with a rejection of the “grand style” music characterized by Wagner’s grand (and grandiose) operas, and a rejection of the established, canonized musical conservatories and the traditional(ist) composition and performance styles they perpetuated. Like the writers, visual artists and architects of the early Modernist period, composers and musicians committed themselves to exploring entirely new means and methods of expression, new techniques of musicianship, and new aesthetic procedures and effects. The twelve tone system largely pioneered by Arnold Schoenberg, for instance, offered a wholly new and unfamiliar approach to tonality and melodic treatment. Igor Stravinsky increasingly rejected traditional (“classical”) approaches to metrical rhythm. And Alexander Scriabin called for enhancing performances of some of his music with extra-musical effects like light shows and fan-circulation of fragrances in the performance hall. Others called for playing instruments in previously unheard-of ways.
Traditional musicologists tend to date the Modernist period in music from about 1890 to about 1930; they typically call the music produced after about 1930 “postmodern.”
The keyword in Modernist music (as in the other arts) is always innovation, variously defined.
“Inherent within musical modernism is the conviction that music is not a static phenomenon defined by timeless truths and classical principles, but rather something which is intrinsically historical and developmental. While belief in musical progress or in the principle of innovation is not new or unique to modernism, such values are particularly important within modernist aesthetic stances.”
– Edward Campbell. Boulez, Music and Philosophy (2010), p. 37.
Combined with this impulse toward progressive, innovative forward-motion was a deliberate rejection of the styles, manner, principles and performance values of “traditional” or “established” music, which Modernist composers regarded as elitist, exclusionist, reactionary, “protectionist” (“retrograde”), repressive, and intolerant of “new” musical thinking.
Modernism in music – as it emerged around 1900 – is characterized by “the dissolution of the traditional tonality and transformation of the very foundations of tonal language, searching for new models in atonalism, polytonalism or other forms of altered tonality.”
–Eero Tarasti. Myth and Music: A Semiotic Approach to the Aesthetics of Myth in Music (The Hague: Mouton, 1979), p. 272.
Attacks on / subversion of the conservative traditional musical tradition through alternative musics.
Composers began to incorporate “popular” forms of music like jazz, folk songs, ethnic music, and extra-musical “noises” into music for performance, intentionally blurring distinctions among genres, traditions, and expectations in music, musicianship, performance and “listening.”
Early examples and precursors: Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler
Immediate successors: Paul Hidemith, Igor Stravinsky
Jazz influences: King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington
Modernism in Music: Some suggestions for listening
The works listed below are representative only, not comprehensive, and they reflect only those years that fall within the generally accepted time period for Modernism in music; therefore, most of these citations are for works dating from the period of 1910-1930.
NOTE: All (or at least most) of the following works are available for listening online at the Naxos Music Library:
[http://0-unl.naxosmusiclibrary.com.library.unl.edu/homepage.asp]
As a student at UNL, you can access this resource without charge!
The transition into Modernism: three works in three years: Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971): his “Russian period” (1907-1919)
The Firebird – ballet (1910), showing the influence of his teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov
Petrushka – ballet (1911), “where Stravinsky became Stravinsky”
Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) – ballet (1913), “to send them all to hell”
Expressionism
The term seems to have appeared first in 1819, in reference to Schoenberg’s music, although there are expressionist elements in the work of earlier composers like Richard Wagner (1813-1883), Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) and Richard Strauss (1864-1949). According to Theodor Adorno, expressionist music attempts to eliminate “all of traditional music’s conventional elements, everything formulaically rigid,” in order to convey “the truthfulness of subjective feeling without illusions, disguises or euphemisms.” Adorno associates expressionism, generally, with the unconscious and says that “the depiction of fear lies at the centre” of all expressionist music, and that therefore dissonance is prominent and even predominant, so that the “harmonious, affirmative element of art is banished” (Theodor Adorno. Night Music: Essays on Music, 1928-1962. Ed. Rolf Tiedemenn; trans. Wieland Hoban [New York: Seagull, ], pp. 275-76)
Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951)
String Quartet No. 2 (1907-08)
Erwartung (Expectation) – one-act monodrama (1909)
Five Pieces for Orchestra (1909)
Anton Webern (1883-1945)
Five Pieces for Orchestra (1911-13)
Piano Sonata, Op. 1
Wozzeck – opera (1914-25)
Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915)
the later piano sonatas
Bela Bartok (1881-1945)
Bluebeard’s Castle (1911)
The Wooden Prince (1917)
The Miraculous Mandarin (1919)
Piano Concerto No. 1 (1926)
Paul Hindemith (1895-1963)
Die junge Magd, Op. 23b – songs (1922)
Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
Three Japanese Lyrics (1913)
Richard Strauss (1864-1949)
Elektra – opera (1909)
Carl Ruggles (1876-1971)
Toys – song for soprano and piano (1919)
Men and Mountains – for orchestra (1924)
Portals – for string orchestra (1925)
Charles Ives (1874-1954)
Piano Sonata No. 2, “Concord, Mass.” (1911-15)
Symphony No. 4. (1910-16)
Futurism
Futurism as a movement in all the arts emerged early in the 20th century. The most important documentary source is Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism (1909), which spelled out the agenda of the Futurist movement. Fundamental to Futurism is the total rejection of tradition (of all sorts, and in all areas of human experience and production), along with an artistic and aesthetic embrace – in music – of unconventional sounds derived from various kinds of machinery and other industrial and electronic technology.
Luigi Russolo (1885-1947)
His The Art of Noises (1913) is one of the most important texts in 20th-century musical aesthetics. It explores the production and manipulation of mechanically-created sounds by means of acoustic noise generators.
Arthur Honegger (1892-1955)
Le roi David (King David) – oratorio (1921)
Pacific 231 (1923)
Edgar Varese (1883-1965)
Ameriques – for large orchestra (1918-21)
Hyperprism – for winds and percussion (1922-23)
George Antheil (1900-1959)
Piano Concerto No. 1 (1922)
Ballet Mechanique (1925-26)
Neoclassicism
Emerged following World War I in a return to traditional “classical” musical principles of order, balance, economy, clarity, and restraint (in emotion, composition, and performance). It rejects the strong emotionalism of later Romanticism in music, on one hand, and the wildly experimental music of c. 1900-1919. Orchestras and chamber ensembles became smaller, performance values became more restrained, composition focused on counterpoint and rhythm, and the music became less “programmatic” (a characteristic of Romanticism that neoclassicists rejected) and more focused on “absolute” music.
Alban Berg (1885-1935)
Piano Sonata, Op. 1 (1907–1908)
Three Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6 (1913-14)
Wozzeck – opera (1922)
Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)
Symphony No. 1 (“Classical”) (1917)
Piano Concerto No. 3 (1921)
The Fiery Angel – opera (1926-27)
Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
Pulcinella – ballet (1919-20)
Suite No. 2 – for chamber orchestra (1921)
Octet (1923)
Concerto for Piano and Winds (1924)
Serenade in A (1925)
Richard Strauss (1864-1949)
Le bourgeois gentilhomme, Op. 60 – orchestral suite (1911, 1917)
Paul Hindemith (1895-1963)
Concerto for Orchestra, Op. 38 (1925)
Kammermusik (Chamber Music) – for various chamber ensembles (1922-1927)
Manuel deFalla (1876-1946)
El retablo de maese Pedro (1919-23)
Psyche – chamber cantata (1924)
Concerto for Harpsichord, Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, Violin and Cello (1926)
Stephen C. Behrendt, Spring 2017