Modernism (music)

The year 1890...lends itself as an obvious point of historical discontinuity

Discontinuity

Discontinuity can be:*Discontinuity , a property of a mathematical functionDiscontinuity may also refer to:*A break in continuity , in literature...
....The "breakthrough" of Mahler

Gustav Mahler

Gustav Mahler was a Bohemian-born Austrian composer and conducting. He was best known during his own lifetime as one of the leading orchestral and operatic conductors of the day....
, Strauss

Richard Strauss

Richard Georg Strauss was a German composer of the late Romantic music and early modern eras, particularly of operas, Lieder and tone poems. Strauss was also a prominent Conducting....
, and Debussy implies a profound historical transformation....If we were to search for a name to convey the breakaway mood of the 1890s (a mood symbolized musically by the opening bars of Strauss's Don Juan

Don Juan

Don Juan or Don Giovanni is a legendary, fictional libertine whose story has been told many times by many authors. El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra, by Tirso de Molina, is a play set in the fourteenth century that was published in Spain around 1630....
) but without imposing a fictitious unity of style on the age, we could do worse than revert to [the] term "modernism" extending (with some latitude) from the 1890 to the beginnings of our own twentieth-century modern music in 1910....The label "late romanticism

Romantic music

In music, romanticism is a term, often considered misleading, and concept derived from literature traditionally defined by attributes including, "interest in nature, medieval chivalry, mysticism, [and] remoteness [ Social alienation and Solitude]"....
"...is a terminological blunder of the first order and ought to be abandoned forthwith.

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Encyclopedia

Modernism in music is characterized by a desire for or belief in progress and science

Science

In its broadest sense, science refers to any systematic knowledge or practice. In its more usual restricted sense, science refers to a system of acquiring knowledge based on scientific method, as well as to the organized body of knowledge gained through such research....
, surrealism

Surrealism

Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early-1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
, anti-romanticism, political advocacy

Advocacy

Advocacy is the pursuit of influencing outcomes — including public-policy and resource allocation decisions within political, economic, and social systems and institutions — that directly affect people?s current lives....
, general intellectualism

Intellectualism

Intellectualism is any of a number of views regarding the use or development of the intellect or the practice of being an intellectual. In non-specialized contexts, the term "intellectualism" is often used to describe an attitude of devotion or high regard for intellectual pursuits....
, and/or a breaking with the past or common practice

Common practice period

The common practice period, in the history of European art music , spanning the Baroque Music, Classical music era, and Romantic Music periods, lasted from about 1600 until about 1900....
 — Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an United States expatriate poetry, critic and intellectual who was a major figure of the Modernist poetry movement in the first half of the 20th century....
's modernist slogan, "Make it new," as applied to music. Modern music is often thought to begin with, or just after, Debussy's impressionist works, rising to rhetorical, if not commercial, dominance after the Second World War

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global military conflict which involved a Participants in World War II, including all of the great powers, organised into two opposing military alliances: the Allies of World War II and the Axis powers....
, and then being gradually displaced by postmodern music

Postmodern music

Postmodern music is either simply music of the Postmodernity, or music that follows the postmodernism ideology. As the name suggests, the postmodernist movement formed partly in reaction to modernism music....
.

Defining musical modernism

Musicologist Carl Dahlhaus

Carl Dahlhaus

File:Carl Dahlhaus.jpgCarl Dahlhaus , a musicologist from Berlin, has been one of the major contributors to the development of musicology as a scholarly discipline during the post-war era....
 restricted his definition of musical modernism to progressive music in the period 1890-1910:

The year 1890...lends itself as an obvious point of historical discontinuity

Discontinuity

Discontinuity can be:*Discontinuity , a property of a mathematical functionDiscontinuity may also refer to:*A break in continuity , in literature...
....The "breakthrough" of Mahler

Gustav Mahler

Gustav Mahler was a Bohemian-born Austrian composer and conducting. He was best known during his own lifetime as one of the leading orchestral and operatic conductors of the day....
, Strauss

Richard Strauss

Richard Georg Strauss was a German composer of the late Romantic music and early modern eras, particularly of operas, Lieder and tone poems. Strauss was also a prominent Conducting....
, and Debussy implies a profound historical transformation....If we were to search for a name to convey the breakaway mood of the 1890s (a mood symbolized musically by the opening bars of Strauss's Don Juan

Don Juan

Don Juan or Don Giovanni is a legendary, fictional libertine whose story has been told many times by many authors. El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra, by Tirso de Molina, is a play set in the fourteenth century that was published in Spain around 1630....
) but without imposing a fictitious unity of style on the age, we could do worse than revert to [the] term "modernism" extending (with some latitude) from the 1890 to the beginnings of our own twentieth-century modern music in 1910....The label "late romanticism

Romantic music

In music, romanticism is a term, often considered misleading, and concept derived from literature traditionally defined by attributes including, "interest in nature, medieval chivalry, mysticism, [and] remoteness [ Social alienation and Solitude]"....
"...is a terminological blunder of the first order and ought to be abandoned forthwith. It is absurd to yoke Strauss, Mahler, and the young Schoenberg, composers who represent modernism in the minds of their turn-of-the-century contemporaries, with the self-proclaimed anti-modernist Pfitzner

Hans Pfitzner

Hans Erich Pfitzner was a Germany composer and self-described anti-Modernism . His best known work is the opera Palestrina , loosely based on the life of the great sixteenth-century composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina....
, calling them all "late romantics

Romanticism

Romanticism is a complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Western Europe, and gained strength during the Industrial Revolution....
" in order to supply a veneer of internal unity to an age fraught with stylistic contradictions and conflicts. (Dahlhaus 1989, 334)

Daniel Albright (2004) dates musical modernism from 1894-5 (Debussy's Prélude à 'L'après-midi d'un faune and Strauss's Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche), and considers musical modernism's main features to be comprehensiveness and depth, semantic specificity

Specificity

Specificity may refer to:* Sensitivity and specificity are related concepts in statistics* A concept relating to Cascading Style Sheets* In linguistics, specificity or definiteness is the distinction of whether the referent is identifiable or not....
 and density

Density

The density of a material is defined as its mass per unit volume. The symbol of density is ....
, and Extensions and destructions

Atonality

Atonality in its broadest sense describes music that lacks a Tonality, or Key . Atonality in this sense usually describes compositions written from about 1908 to the present day where a hierarchy of pitches focusing on a single, central tone is not used and the notes of the chromatic scale function independently of one another ....
 of tonality

Tonality

Tonality is a system of music in which specific hierarchy pitch relationships are based on a Key "center" or Tonic . The term tonalit? originated with Alexandre-?tienne Choron and was borrowed by Fran?ois-Joseph F?tis in 1840 ....
.

However, as an alternative to this definition Albright proposes: "Modernism is a testing of the limits of aesthetic construction." Besides eliminating the progress meta-narrative of the above definition, this definition is also capable of application to more the music, artists, and movements considered modernist: Expressionism

Expressionism

Expressionism is the tendency of an artist to distort reality for an emotional effect; it is a subjective art form. Expressionism is exhibited in many art forms, including painting, literature, theatre, film, Expressionist architecture and Expressionism ....
 & New Objectivity

New Objectivity

The New Objectivity , was an art movement that arose in Germany in the early 1920s as an outgrowth of, and in opposition to, expressionism. The movement essentially ended in 1933 with the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis to power....
, Hyperrealism

Hyperreality

In semiotics and postmodern philosophy, the term hyperreality characterizes the inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from fantasy, especially in technologically advanced postmodern cultures....
 & Abstraction

Abstraction

Abstraction is the process or result of generalization by reducing the information content of a concept or an observable phenomenon, typically in order to retain only information which is relevant for a particular purpose....
ism, Neoclassicism

Neoclassicism

Neoclassicism is the name given to quite distinct Cultural movement in the Decorative art and visual arts, literature, theatre, music, and architecture that draw upon Western classical art and culture ....
 & Neobarbarism

Barbarism

Barbarism may refer to:* Barbarism , the condition to which a society or civilization may be reduced after a societal collapse, relative to an earlier period of cultural or technological advancement; the term may also be used pejoratively to describe another society or civilization which is deemed inferior in some way....
, Futurism

Futurism

Futurism or Futurist may refer to:* Futurology* Futurists * Futurist architecture* Futurist meals, a gastronomic movement based on Futurism...
 & the myth

Mythology

The word mythology refers to a body of folklore/myths/legends that a particular culture believes to be true and that often use the supernatural to interpret natural events and to explain the nature of the universe and humanity....
ic Method.

Leon Botstein, on the other hand, asserts that musical modernism is characterized by "a conception of modernity dominated by the progress of science, technology and industry, and by positivism, mechanization, urbanization, mass culture and nationalism", an aesthetic reaction to which "reflected not only enthusiasm but ambivalence and anxiety" (Botstein 2007).

Other writers regard the period of musical modernism as extending only to about 1930, and apply the term "postmodernism" to the period after that year (Karolyi 1994, 135; Meyer 1994, 331–32). In contrast, Albright (ibid) cites John Cage

John Cage

John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer. A pioneer of Aleatoric music, electronic music and Extended technique, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde and, in the opinion of many, the most influential American composer of the 20th century....
's 1951 composition of Music of Changes as the beginning of post-modern music.

Examples of modernism in music

• Sound based composition

In the 1910s, futurists

Futurists

Futurists, or futurologists, are those who speculate about the future....
 such as Luigi Russolo

Luigi Russolo

Luigi Russolo was an Italian people Futurism painter and composer, and the author of the manifesto The Art of Noises .He is often regarded as one of the first experimental musicians and experimental composers....
 looked to a future of music liberated to the point of being able to use any sound

Sound

Sound is vibration transmitted through a solid, liquid, or gas, composed of frequencies within the range of hearing and of a threshold of hearing to be heard, or the sensation stimulated in organs of hearing by such vibrations....
, even "noise

Noise

In common use, the word noise means unwanted sound or noise pollution. In electronics noise can refer to the electronic signal corresponding to acoustic noise or the electronic signal corresponding to the noise commonly seen as 'Noise ' on a degraded television or video image....
s" such as factory and mechanical sounds (Russolo, ), while Edgard Varèse

Edgard Varèse

Edgard Victor Achille Charles Var?se, whose name was also spelled Edgar Var?se , was an innovative French-born composer who spent the greater part of his career in the United States....
 created his Poème électronique

Poème électronique

Po?me ?lectronique is a piece of electronic music by composer Edgard Var?se. Var?se composed the piece with the intention of creating a liberation between sounds and as a result uses noises not usually considered "musical" throughout the piece....
 specifically for the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair

Expo '58

Expo 58, also known as the Brussels World?s Fair, Brusselse Wereldtentoonstelling or Exposition Universelle et Internationale de Bruxelles, was held from 17 April to 19 October 1958....
 with 400 speakers, designed by Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier

Charles-?douard Jeanneret-Gris, who chose to be known as Le Corbusier , was a Swiss-French architect, designer, urbanist, writer and also Painting, who is famous for being one of the pioneers of what now is called Modern architecture or the International Style....
 with the assistance of Iannis Xenakis

Iannis Xenakis

Iannis Xenakis was a Greeks modernist composer, musical theoretician, and architect. He is regarded as an important and influential composer of the twentieth century....
 (EMF Institute article ).

• Extended techniques and sounds

John Cage

John Cage

John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer. A pioneer of Aleatoric music, electronic music and Extended technique, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde and, in the opinion of many, the most influential American composer of the 20th century....
 and Lou Harrison

Lou Harrison

Lou Silver Harrison was an United States composer. He was a student of Henry Cowell, Arnold Schoenberg, and K.R.T. Wasitodiningrat .Harrison is particularly noted for incorporating elements of the world music into his work, with a number of pieces written for Javanese style gamelan musical instrument, including ensembles constructed and tu...
 wrote works in the late 1940s for percussion

Percussion instrument

A percussion instrument is any object which produces a sound by being hit with an implement, shaken, rubbed, scraped, or by any other action which sets the object into vibration....
 orchestra. Harrison later wrote for and built gamelan

Gamelan

File:Javanese Gamelan.jpgA gamelan is a musical ensemble from Indonesia, typically from the islands of Bali or Java, featuring a variety of instruments such as metallophones, xylophones, drums and gongs; bamboo flutes, bowed and plucked strings....
s, while Cage popularized extended technique

Extended technique

Extended techniques are performance techniques used in music to describe unconventional, unorthodox or "improper" wiktionary:techniques of singing, or of playing musical instruments....
s on the piano in his prepared piano

Prepared piano

A prepared piano is a piano which has had its sound altered by placing objects between or on the strings or on the hammers or dampers.The idea of altering an instrument's timbre through the use of external objects has been applied to instruments other than the piano; see, for example, prepared guitar....
 pieces, starting in 1938 () Starting in the early 1920s, Harry Partch

Harry Partch

File:Harry Partch Institute-6.jpgHarry Partch was an United Statesn composer and musical instrument creator. He was one of the first twentieth-century composers to work extensively and systematically with microtonality scale s, writing much of his music for custom-made instruments that he built himself, tuned in 11-limit just intonation....
 built his own ensemble of instruments, mostly percussion and string instruments, to allow the performance of his theatrical ("corporeal") justly

Just intonation

In music, just intonation is any musical tuning in which the frequency of notes are related by ratios of whole numbers. Any interval tuned in this way is called a just interval; in other words, the two notes are members of the same harmonic series ....
 tuned microtonal music

Microtonal music

Microtonal music is music using microtones ? musical interval of less than an Equal Temperament semitone.Microtonal music can also refer to music which uses intervals not found in the Western system of 12 equal intervals to the octave....
 ().

• Speech and singing

Kurt Schwitters

Kurt Schwitters

Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters was a German painters who was born in Hanover, Germany. Schwitters worked in several genres and media, including Dada, Constructivism , Surrealism, poetry, sound, painting, sculpture, graphic design, typography and what came to be known as installation art....
' Ursonate (1921–32) develops from words like "fmsbwtözäu", taken from the "poster-poems" of Raoul Hausmann

Raoul Hausmann

Raoul Hausmann was an Austrian artist and writer. One of the key figures in Dada#Berlin, his experimental photographic collages, sound poetry and institutional critiques would have a profound influence on the European Avant-Garde in the aftermath of World War I....
.

• Expansion on/abandonment of tonality

Atonality

Atonality

Atonality in its broadest sense describes music that lacks a Tonality, or Key . Atonality in this sense usually describes compositions written from about 1908 to the present day where a hierarchy of pitches focusing on a single, central tone is not used and the notes of the chromatic scale function independently of one another ....
, the twelve tone technique, polytonality

Polytonality

The musical use of more than one key simultaneity is polytonality. Bitonality is the use of only two different keys at the same time.A well-known, controversial example is the fanfare at the beginning of the second tableau of Igor Stravinsky's ballet, Petrushka....
, tone cluster

Tone cluster

A tone cluster is a chord comprising at least three consecutive tones in a musical scale. Prototypical tone clusters are based on the chromatic scale, and are separated by semitones....
s, dissonant counterpoint, and serialism

Serialism

In music, serialism is a technique for Musical composition#A musical composition that uses Set to describe Aspect of music, and allows the Permutation of those sets....
.

History of modernism in music

Late nineteenth-century origins

As with many other arts, the consciousness of modernity appeared before music which is now labelled "modernist".

Alternative categorizations

Despite Albright's definitions (ibid) he points out examples of his three traits of modernism long before 1894. Orlando Gibbons

Orlando Gibbons

Orlando Gibbons was an England composer and organist of the late Tudor period and early Jacobean era. He was a leading composer in the England of his day....
' The Cries of London, Joseph Haydn

Joseph Haydn

Joseph Haydn was an Austrians composer. He was one of the most prominent composers of the classical music era, and is called by some the "Father of the Symphony" and "Father of the String Quartet"....
's The Creation

The Creation

The Creation is an oratorio written between 1796 and 1798 by Joseph Haydn , and considered by many to be his masterpiece. The oratorio depicts and celebrates the creation of the world as described in the biblical Book of Genesis....
, and many romantic works attempt maximal comprehensiveness and depth, such as Ludwig van Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven was a German composer and pianist. He was a crucial figure in the transitional period between the Classical music era and Romantic music eras in classical music, and remains one of the most acclaimed and influential composers of all time....
's Ninth Symphony

Symphony No. 9 (Beethoven)

The Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Opus number 125 "Choral" is the last complete symphony composed by Ludwig van Beethoven. Completed in 1824, the choral symphony Ninth Symphony is one of the best known works of the Western repertoire, considered both an icon and a forefather of Romantic music, and one of Beethoven's greatest masterpieces....
. Semantic specificity has always existed, such as in Clément Janequin

Clément Janequin

Cl?ment Janequin was a France composer of the Renaissance music. He was one of the most famous composers of popular chansons of the entire Renaissance, and along with Claudin de Sermisy, was hugely influential in the development of the Parisian chanson, especially the program music type....
's Le chant des oiseaux (birds), Alessandro Poglietti

Alessandro Poglietti

Alessandro Poglietti was an Austrian people Baroque organist and composer of unknown origin. Although he was one of the most important composers of keyboard instrument music in south Germany and an acclaimed teacher during his lifetime, Poglietti's music is rarely performed or recorded today....
's Rossignolo (nightingale), Antonio Vivaldi

Antonio Vivaldi

Antonio Lucio Vivaldi , nicknamed il Prete Rosso , was a Baroque music composer and Venice priest, as well as a famous virtuoso violinist, born and raised in the Republic of Venice....
's The Four Seasons

The Four Seasons (Vivaldi)

The Four Seasons is a set of four violin concertos by Antonio Vivaldi. Composed in 1723, The Four Seasons is Vivaldi's best-known work, and is among the most popular pieces of Baroque music....
 (barking dog), Beethoven's Sixth Symphony

Symphony No. 6 (Beethoven)

Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 6 in F major , known as the Pastoral Symphony, was completed in 1808. One of Beethoven's few works of program music, the symphony was labeled at its first performance with the title "Recollections of Country Life"....
 (birds), or Haydn's The Seasons

The Seasons (Haydn)

The Seasons is an oratorio by Joseph Haydn ....
 (frog croaks). Composers have long used semantic density to indicate disorder, while Nicolas Gombert

Nicolas Gombert

Nicolas Gombert was a Franco-Flemish School composer of the Renaissance. He was one of the most famous and influential composers between Josquin Desprez and Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, and best represents the fully-developed, complex polyphony style of this period in music history....
 has used four voices singing four simultaneous different antiphon

Antiphon

An antiphon is a response, usually sung in Gregorian chant, to a psalm or some other part of a religious service, such as at Vespers or at a mass ....
s to the Virgin Mary, as would be heard by the omniscient Mary. Chromaticism has existed since the Greeks in some conception or another, such as Carlo Gesualdo

Carlo Gesualdo

Carlo Gesualdo, known as Gesualdo da Venosa , Prince of Venosa and Count of Conza, was an Italian music composer, lutenist and nobleman of the late Renaissance music....
's Tristis est anima mea.

Albright also points out that there are few traits of postmodernism not present in modernism. Erik Satie

Erik Satie

Alfred ?ric Leslie Satie was a France composer and pianist. Starting with his first composition in 1884, he signed his name as Erik Satie....
 and the neoclassicism of Stravinsky is sometimes near indistinguishable with bricolage

Bricolage

Bricolage, is a term used in several disciplines, among them the visual arts and literature, to refer to:* the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things which happen to be available;...
 and polystylism

Polystylism

Polystylism is the use of multiple music genres or wikt:technique of music, and is seen as a postmodern characteristic.Some prominent contemporary music composers commonly listed as polystylist include Ciar?n Farrell, Lera Auerbach, Yitzhak Yedid, Sofia Gubaidulina, George Rochberg, Alfred Schnittke, Django Bates and John Zorn....
. Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp was a France artist whose work is most often associated with the Dada and Surrealism movements. Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art....
 wrote chance music while Cage was still into percussion.

Musical modernism's reception and controversy

Stanley Cavell describes the "burden of modernism" as caused by a situation wherein the "procedures and problems it now seems necessary to composers to employ and confront to make a work of art at all themselves insure that their work will not be comprehensible to an audience" (Cavell 1976, 187).

Brian Ferneyhough

Brian Ferneyhough

Brian John Peter Ferneyhough is an England composer of contemporary classical music. His complex, multi-layered music is always distinctive when performed, and led Pierre Boulez to refer to it as a 'polyphony of polyphonies'....
 coined the neologism "too-muchness" to describe the excess of information contained in music exhibiting the New Complexity

New Complexity

In music, the New Complexity is a term dating from the 1980s intended to categorize primarily United Kingdom composers seeking a "complex, multi-layered interplay of Developing variation processes occurring simultaneously within every aspects of music of the musical material" ....
, and many would argue this applies to its modernist inspirations as well.

Response

Arved Ashby (2004) compares the information actually conveyed when "Modernism Goes to the Movies" [by modernist music techniques in film scores] with the general failure to communicate attributed by Fred Lerdahl

Fred Lerdahl

Fred Lerdahl is the Fritz Reiner Professor of Musical Composition at Columbia University, and a composer and Music theory best known for his work on pitch space and cognition constraints on compositional systems or "musical grammar[s]." As a composer, Lerdahl is widely respected for his chamber works, including Time After Time, a finali...
 and others to modernist music and concludes that "the tendency to fault modernist music [for being non-syntactical] would seem, then, to stem from interrelated desires to limit the powers of music in general and to prevent it from keeping pace with the sociogenetic, media-related tendencies of recent decades." Perhaps, then, to deny that modernist music has meaning, in the face of its use for meaning, is to betray a desire to disallow that music meaning.

Sources

• Albright, Daniel. 2000. Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226012530 (cloth) ISBN 0226012549 (pbk)
• Albright, Daniel. 2004. Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-01267-0.
• Ashby, Arved. 2004. "Modernism Goes to the Movies". In The Pleasure of Modernist Music, edited by Arved Ashby, 345-86. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. ISBN 1-58046-143-3.
• Botstein, Leon. "Modernism". Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy. (subscription access)
• Cavell, Stanley. 1976. "Music Discomposed", in his Must We Mean What We Say?. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521290481 (cloth), ISBN 0521211166 (pbk). Updated edition, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN 0521821886 (cloth), ISBN 0521529190 (pbk). Cited in The Pleasure of Modernist Music, edited by, Arved Ashby, 146 n13. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. ISBN 1-58046-143-3.
• Dahlhaus, Carl. 1989. Nineteenth-Century Music. Translated by J. Bradford Robinson. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Karolyi, Otto. 1994. Modern British Music: The Second British Musical Renaissance—From Elgar to P. Maxwell Davies. Rutherford, Madison, Teaneck: Farleigh Dickinson University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses. ISBN 0-8386-3532-6
• Meyer, Leonard B. 1994. Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Patterns and Predictions in Twentieth-Century Culture, second edition. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-52143-5

External links