Modernism (music)

Summary

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In music, modernism is an aesthetic stance underlying the period of change and development in musical language that occurred around the turn of the 20th century, a period of diverse reactions in challenging and reinterpreting older categories of music, innovations that led to new ways of organizing and approaching harmonic, melodic, sonic, and rhythmic aspects of music, and changes in aesthetic worldviews in close relation to the larger identifiable period of modernism in the arts of the time. The operative word most associated with it is "innovation".[1] Its leading feature is a "linguistic plurality", which is to say that no one music genre ever assumed a dominant position.[2]

A caricature of the infamous Scandal Concert, conducted by Arnold Schoenberg on 31 March 1913.

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 (2010, p. 37) [emphasis added]

Examples include the celebration of Arnold Schoenberg's rejection of tonality in chromatic post-tonal and twelve-tone works and Igor Stravinsky's move away from symmetrical rhythm.[3]

Authorities typically regard musical modernism as an historical period or era extending from about 1890 to 1930, and apply the term "postmodernism" to the period or era after 1930.[4][5] For the musicologist Carl Dahlhaus the purest form was over by 1910, but other historians consider modernism to end with one or the other of the two world wars.[6]

Definitions edit

Carl Dahlhaus describes modernism as:

an obvious point of historical discontinuity ... The "breakthrough" of Mahler, Strauss, 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) but without imposing a fictitious unity of style on the age, we could do worse than revert to Hermann Bahr's term "modernism" and speak of a stylistically open-ended "modernist music" extending (with some latitude) from 1890 to the beginnings of our own twentieth-century modern music in 1910.[7]

Eero Tarasti defines musical modernism directly in terms of "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", which took place around the turn of the century.[8]

Daniel Albright proposes a definition of musical modernism as, "a testing of the limits of aesthetic construction" and presents the following modernist techniques or styles: Expressionism, the New Objectivity, Hyperrealism, Abstractionism, Neoclassicism, Neobarbarism, Futurism, and the Mythic Method.[9]

Conductor and scholar Leon Botstein describes musical modernism as "...a consequence of the fundamental conviction among successive generations of composers since 1900 that the means of musical expression in the 20th century must be adequate to the unique and radical character of the age",[10] which led to a reflection in the arts of the progress of science, technology and industry, mechanization, urbanization, mass culture and nationalism.

Similarly, Eric Pietro defines Modernism in his narrative Listening In: Music, Mind, and the Modernist as, “…a desire to find ‘ever more accurate representations of psychological states and processes’ by virtue of its links with the ‘historical crisis of the nineteenth century.’” From what we can understand with this information, there are two distinguishable concepts emphasizing Modernism: the first being music mirroring narrative depictions of the mind; and the second being music as a vocabulary that faces the possibility of describing psychological behaviors in language.[11]

Other usage edit

The term "modernism" (and the term "post-modern") has occasionally been applied to some genres of popular music, but not with any very clear definition.

For example, the cultural studies professor Andrew Goodwin writes that "given the confusion of the terms, the identification of postmodern texts has ranged across an extraordinarily divergent, and incoherent profusion of textual instances ... Secondly, there are debates within popular music about pastiche and authenticity. 'Modernism' means something quite different within each of these two fields ... This confusion is obvious in an early formative attempt to understand rock music in postmodern terms".[12] Goodwin argues that instances of modernism in popular music are generally not cited because "it undermines the postmodern thesis of cultural fusion, in its explicit effort to preserve a bourgeois notion of Art in opposition to mainstream, 'commercial' rock and pop".[13]

Author Domenic Priore writes that: "the concept of Modernism was bound up in the very construction of the Greater Los Angeles area, at a time when the city was just beginning to come into its own as an international, cultural center",;[14] it appears that the word is used here as an equivalent of the term "modern". Priore cites "River Deep – Mountain High" by Ike & Tina Turner (1966) and "Good Vibrations" by the Beach Boys (1966). Desiring "a taste of Modern, avant-garde R&B" for the latter's recording, group member and song co-writer Brian Wilson considered the music "advanced rhythm and blues", but received criticism from his bandmates, who derided the track for being "too Modern" during its making.[15]

History edit

Early Modernism edit

 
Arnold Schoenberg, 1927, by Man Ray

In the final decade leading up to the turn of the 20th century, the Romantic era in music had entered into its late period where great changes were occurring. Amongst the biggest changes were with the traditional tonal system, which was now being regularly stretched to its limits by composers such as Gustav Mahler who began incorporating progressive tonality[16] into his pieces. The Impressionists such as Claude Debussy also began experimenting with ambiguous tonality and exotic scales. “The perception of Debussy’s compositional language as decidedly post-romantic/Impressionistic—nuanced, understated, and subtle—is firmly solidified among today’s musicians and well-informed audiences."[17] Although this isn’t the first time composers began pushing the limits of tonality as can be seen in the works of Richard Wagner in Tristan und Isolde[18] and in the works of Franz Liszt in Bagatelle sans tonalité,[19] these practices became far more commonplace within the late romantic period. This break with tonality finally came to a critical point in 1908 when Arnold Schoenberg composed the second string quartet, Op. 10, with soprano. The last movement of this piece contains no key signature,[20] marking a decisive transition point from Romanticism into Modernism.

Within this newly established Modernist era, several new parallel movements were founded as a reaction against late romanticism. The most prominent of these movements included Expressionism with Arnold Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School being its main promoters, Neoclassicism with Igor Stravinsky being its most influential composer, and Futurism with Luigi Russolo being one of its main proponents.

Musical expressionism is closely associated with the music of the Second Viennese School during their "free atonal" period from 1908 to 1921.[21] One of the main goals of this movement was to avoid "traditional forms of beauty" to convey powerful feelings in their music. [22] In essence, Expressionist music often features a high level of dissonance, extreme contrasts of dynamics, constant changing of textures, "distorted" melodies and harmonies, and angular melodies with wide leaps.[23]

In the early 1920s, Schoenberg developed the Twelve-tone technique, a method of musical composition which ensures that all 12 notes of the chromatic scale are sounded as often as one another in a composition while preventing the emphasis of any one note[24] through the use of tone rows and the orderings of the 12 pitch classes. This new technique was quickly adopted by members of the Second Viennese School, namely Anton Webern who refined the system and became a massive influence to the development of Serialism.

After the end of World War I, another group of composers, informally led by Igor Stravinsky, began to return to past traditions for inspiration and wrote works that draw elements such as form, harmony, melody, structure from it. This type of music thus became labelled as neoclassicism. Examples of composers and works in this new style includes; Igor Stravinsky (Pulcinella), Sergei Prokofiev (Classical Symphony), Maurice Ravel (Le Tombeau de Couperin), Manuel de Falla (El retablo de maese Pedro) and Paul Hindemith (Symphony: Mathis der Maler).

Italian composers such as Francesco Balilla Pratella and Luigi Russolo aided in developing musical Futurism. This genre attempts to recreate everyday sounds and place them within a "Futurist" context. The "Machine Music" of George Antheil (starting with his Second Sonata, "The Airplane") and Alexander Mosolov (most notoriously his Iron Foundry) developed from this. The process of extending musical vocabulary by exploring all available tones was pushed further by the use of Microtones. This can be seen in works of composers such as Charles Ives, Julián Carrillo, Alois Hába, John Foulds, Ivan Wyschnegradsky, Harry Partch and Mildred Couper. Microtones are intervals that are smaller than a semitone; human voices and unfretted strings can easily produce them by going in between the "normal" notes, however other musical instruments will have more difficulty in achieving the same result. The piano and organ have no way of producing them at all, aside from retuning or from major reconstruction.

The 1930s proved to be a difficult time for the Modernist music scene in Europe when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party took power in Germany and the Austrofascists took power in Austria. As a result, most Modernist music which featured atonality, dissonance, and “disturbing rhythms” were deemed as degenerate music and banned. The music of Alban Berg, Hans Eisler, Paul Hindemith, Arnold Schoenberg, Anton von Webern, Kurt Weill, and other formerly prominent composers, as well as Jewish composers such as Felix Mendelssohn, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Jacques Offenbach and even George Gershwin and Irving Berlin, were no longer programmed or allowed to be performed.[25] As a result of these new policies, many prominent Modernist composers such as Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky were forced to flee to the United States while others such as Anton Webern was forced to compose his works in secret.

High Modernism edit

 
Karlheinz Stockhausen on 2 September 1972 at the Shiraz-Persepolis Festival of Arts. [26]

World War II was enormously devastating for Europe and a new generation of composers had to pick up the pieces and reestablish the art music scene. Through the rediscovery and promotion of pre-war composers, most notably that of Anton Webern and Edgard Varèse, Serialism came to become one of the most dominant techniques within the classical music establishment for the next few decades. Influenced by the pioneering works of the Second Viennese School, starting in 1946, the Darmstädter Ferienkurse began an annual summer program in Darmstadt, Germany where Modernist forms of classical music were taught and promoted. Among the most important composers to emerge from these courses includes Pierre Boulez, Bruno Maderna, Luigi Nono, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Together, this group came to be known as the Darmstadt School. Among their primary goals was to reestablish and expand upon the serialist philosophies established by the likes of Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern. [27] Igor Stravinsky was also encouraged to explore serial music and the composers of the Second Viennese School, beginning Stravinsky's third and final distinct musical period, which lasted from 1954 until his death in 1971.[28][29][30] However, some more traditionally based composers such as Dmitri Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten maintained a tonal style of composition despite the prominent serialist movement.

The United States took a somewhat different direction to Modernism in comparison to their European counterparts in the early post-war era. American composers including John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and Christian Wolff[31] formed an informal circle musicians called the New York School. This group was far less concerned in working with serialism but rather focused on experimenting with chance. Their compositions influenced the music and events of the Fluxus group, and drew its name from Abstract Expressionist painters. However, composers such as Milton Babbitt, George Rochberg, and Roger Sessions fashioned their own extensions of the twelve-tone serialism of Schoenberg.

One of the most important and influential developments from from the Modernist music scene in America was the concept of indeterminacy in music. Spearheaded by John Cage, this new composition approach left some aspects of a musical work open to chance or to the interpreter's free choice. This can be seen in Cage’s Music of Changes (1951), where the composer selects the duration, tempo, and dynamics by using the I Ching, an ancient Chinese book which prescribes methods for arriving at random numbers.[32] Another example is Morton Feldman's "Intersection No. 2" (1951) for piano solo, written on coordinate paper. Time units are represented by the squares viewed horizontally, while relative pitch levels of high, middle, and low are indicated by three vertical squares in each row. The performer determines what particular pitches and rhythms to play.[33]

In Europe, a similar method of composition developed. Coined as "aleatory music" by Meyer-Eppler and popularized by the French composer Pierre Boulez,[34] this new compositional style did not completely give away its creation and performance to chance but rather the notated events are provided by the composer, but their arrangement is left to the determination of the performer. A prominent example of this style can be seen in Karlheinz Stockhausen's work Klavierstück XI (1956) where the nineteen events presented are composed and notated in a traditional way, but the arrangement of these events is determined by the performer spontaneously during the performance. Another example can be seen in Earle Brown's Available forms II (1962), where the conductor is asked to decide the order of the events at the very moment of the performance.[35]

Major developments were also beginning to take shape in Electronic music shortly after the end of World War II. In the late 1940s, acoustic engineer and radio scientist Pierre Schaeffer created a new style of composition called Musique concrète where recorded sounds are utilized as raw material.[36] These recorded sounds are often modified through the application of audio signal processing and tape music techniques, and may be assembled into a form of sound collage.[nb 1] Schaeffer’s pioneering works attracted and inspired a new generation of composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis, Pierre Boulez, and others to try their hands in this new world and develop their own innovations.

Transition to Postmodernism edit

During the 1960s and 1970s, a backlash began to emerge against the strict serialism promoted by the likes of the Darmstadt School which had essentially taken over the academic musical establishment. In America, a new form of art music called Minimal music had emerged as a reaction against the perceived extreme and unsurpassable complexity of serialism.[38] Instead minimal music focuses on the repetition of slowly changing common chords in steady rhythms, often overlaid with a lyrical melody in long, arching phrases.[39]

Europe also experienced a similar backlash against strict serialism as can be seen in the emergence of the New Simplicity movement spearheaded by composers such as Wolfgang Rihm. In general, these composers strove for an immediacy between the creative impulse and the musical result, which contrasts with the elaborate precompositional planning characteristic of the High Modernists. Some writers argue that Darmstadt School representative Karlheinz Stockhausen, had anticipated this reaction through a radical simplification of his style accomplished between 1966 and 1975, which culminated in his Tierkreis melodies.[40][41][42]

Movements & Schools edit

Impressionism edit

Impressionism was a movement among various composers in Western classical music from about 1890 to 1920, whose music focuses on mood and atmosphere.[43] Just like Impressionism in painting and Impressionism in literature musical impressionism tries to represent impressions of moments. The most prominent feature of impressionist music is the timbre and instrumentation. Layerings of musical levels are typical but alsi includes; a profound but not intrusive bass, moving middle voices and a significant motif in the upper voices, and is not subject to the laws of the usual classical-romantic processing (diminution, secession, etc.) but is treated rather associatively. The most noteworthy composers of this movement includes Claude Debussy, Erik Satie, and Maurice Ravel.

Expressionism edit

Expressionism was a movement in music where composers sought a subjective immediacy of expression, drawn as directly as possible from the human soul. To achieve this, a break with tradition in regards to traditional aesthetics and the previous forms was desired. Stylistically, the changed function of dissonances is particularly striking; they appear on an equal footing with consonances and are no longer resolved – what was also called the "emancipation of dissonance". The tonal system is largely dissolved and expanded into atonality. Musical characteristics include: extreme pitches, extreme dynamic contrasts (from whispering to screaming, from pppp to ffff), jagged melody lines with wide leaps; metrically unbound, free rhythm and novel instrumentation. Form: asymmetrical period structure; rapid succession of contrasting moments; often very short "aphoristic" pieces. The main representatives of this movement are the composers of the Second Viennese School: Arnold Schönberg, Anton Webern and Alban Berg.

Second Viennese School edit

Futurism edit

Futurism was a movement originating in Italy which rejected tradition and introduced experimental sounds inspired by machinery. Much of this new genre’s origins can be traced to painter and composer Luigi Russolo, who in 1913 published his groundbreaking manifesto, The Art of Noises calling for the incorporation of noises of every kind into music.[44] This inspired fellow Italian composers Francesco Balilla Pratella and Franco Casavola to follow in his footsteps. This new aesthetic also became quickly embraced by the Russian avant-garde creating a parallel movement of Russian Futurists. Among the most prominent Russian composers from this tradition includes Mikhail Matyushin and Nikolai Roslavets.

Neoclassicism edit

Neoclassicism was a movement, especially prevalent during the interwar period, in which composers sought to return to aesthetic precepts associated with the broadly defined concept of "classicism", namely order, balance, clarity, economy, and emotional restraint. As such, neoclassicism was a reaction against the unrestrained emotionalism and perceived formlessness of late Romanticism, as well as a "call to order" after the experimental ferment of the first two decades of the twentieth century. The neoclassical impulse found its expression in such features as the use of pared-down performing forces, an emphasis on rhythm and on contrapuntal texture, an updated or expanded tonal harmony, and a concentration on absolute music as opposed to Romantic program music. The main representatives of this movement are Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Prokofiev.

Darmstadt School edit

The Darmstadt School refers to a group of composers who were associated with the Darmstädter Ferienkurse from the 1950s and 1960s centered in Darmstadt, Germany. Greatly influenced by Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, they developed it further to create Integral Serialism and implemented it into their compositions. Other key influences of the School included the works of Anton Webern, Edgard Varèse [45], and Olivier Messiaen's "Mode de valeurs et d'intensités" (from the Quatre études de rythme). The most prominent composers include Pierre Boulez, Bruno Maderna, Luigi Nono, and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

New York School edit

The New York School was an informal circle of experimental musicians and composers active in the 1950s and 1960s originating from New York City. They often drew inspiration from the Dada and contemporary avant-garde art movements. Their music often displayed indeterminacy, electroacoustic properties, and non-standard use of musical instruments. They were in particular greatly influenced by the pioneering experimental works of Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, and Edgard Varèse. The most prominent composers of this compositional school include John Cage, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, Morton Feldman, and David Tudor.

Composition Methods & Genres edit

Atonality edit

Twelve-tone technique edit

Serialism edit

Musique concrète edit

Musique concrète (French; "concrete music"), is a form of electroacoustic music that utilises recorded sounds as a compositional resource. The compositional material is commonly modified through the application of audio signal processing and tape music techniques, and can be assembled into a sound collage structure.[37] The theoretical basis of this compositional practice was developed by French composer Pierre Schaeffer beginning in the early 1940s. Other prominent composers who used or were influenced by this compositional technique include Pierre Henry, Luc Ferrari, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Edgard Varèse, and Iannis Xenakis.

Indeterminacy edit

Aleatoric music edit

See also edit

Notes edit

  1. ^ Musique concrète has been referred to as a sound collage technique.[37]

References edit

  1. ^ Metzer 2009, p. 3.
  2. ^ Morgan 1984, p. 443.
  3. ^ Campbell 2010, p. 37.
  4. ^ Károlyi 1994, p. 135.
  5. ^ Meyer 1994, pp. 331–332.
  6. ^ Albright 2004, p. 13.
  7. ^ Dahlhaus 1989, p. 334.
  8. ^ Tarasti 1979, p. 272.
  9. ^ Albright 2004, p. 11.
  10. ^ Botstein 2001.
  11. ^ Waddell, Nathan (2017). "Modernism and Music: A Review of Recent Scholarship". Modernist Cultures. 12 (2): 316–330. doi:10.3366/mod.2017.0173.
  12. ^ Goodwin 2006, p. 441.
  13. ^ Goodwin 2006, p. 446.
  14. ^ Priore 2005, p. 16.
  15. ^ Priore 2005, pp. 16, 20, 48.
  16. ^ William Kinderman and Harald Krebs, eds. (1996). The Second Practice of Nineteenth-Century Tonality, p.9. ISBN 978-0-8032-2724-8
  17. ^ de Médicis, François; Huebner, Steven, eds. (2018-12-31). Debussy's Resonance. doi:10.1017/9781787442528. ISBN 978-1-78744-252-8. S2CID 239438810.
  18. ^ Millington 1992, p. 301.
  19. ^ Searle, New Grove 11:11:39.
  20. ^ Simms, Bryan R. (2000). The Atonal Music of Arnold Schoenberg, 1908–1923. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 29. ISBN 978-0-19-535185-9. OCLC 252600219.
  21. ^ Schoenberg 1975, 207–208.
  22. ^ Sadie 1991, 244.
  23. ^ Anon. 2014.
  24. ^ Perle 1977, 2.
  25. ^ Spotts 2003, pp. 268–270.
  26. ^ Stockhausen 1978, pp. 158–259.
  27. ^ Bandur 2001, pp. 5, 10–11.
  28. ^ White 1979, p. 133.
  29. ^ Whiting 2005, p. 40.
  30. ^ Straus 2001, p. 4.
  31. ^ See David Ni of Music and the Visual Arts, Routledge 2001, pp. 17–56.
  32. ^ Joe & Song 2002, p. 268.
  33. ^ Joe & Song 2002, p. 269.
  34. ^ Boulez 1957.
  35. ^ Joe & Song 2002, p. 269.
  36. ^ Holmes (2008), p. 45
  37. ^ a b McLeod & DiCola 2011, p. 38.
  38. ^ Gann 1997, 184–85.
  39. ^ Rodda, 2 & 4.
  40. ^ Faltin 1979, p. 192.
  41. ^ Andraschke 1981, pp. 126, 137–41.
  42. ^ Gruhn 1981, pp. 185–186.
  43. ^ Michael Kennedy, "Impressionism", The Oxford Dictionary of Music, second edition, revised, Joyce Bourne, associate editor (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). ISBN 978-0-19-861459-3.
  44. ^ Russolo 1913.
  45. ^ Iddon 2013, p. 40.

Sources edit

  • Albright, Daniel. 2004. Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-01267-0.
  • Botstein, Leon. "Modernism". Grove Music Online edited by Laura Macy. (subscription required).
  • Campbell, Edward. 2010. Boulez, Music and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-86242-4.
  • Dahlhaus, Carl. 1989. Nineteenth-Century Music. Translated by J. Bradford Robinson. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  • Goodwin, Andrew (2006). "Popular Music and Postmodern Theory". In John Storey (ed.). Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader. University of Georgia Press. ISBN 978-0-8203-2849-2.
  • Károlyi, Ottó. 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.
  • Metzer, David Joel. 2009. Musical Modernism at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century. Music in the Twentieth Century 26. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-51779-9.
  • 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.
  • Morgan, Robert P. (March 1984). "Secret Languages: The Roots of Musical Modernism". Critical Inquiry. 10 (3): 442–461. doi:10.1086/448257. JSTOR 1343302. S2CID 161937907.
  • Priore, Domenic (2005). Smile: The Story of Brian Wilson's Lost Masterpiece. London: Sanctuary. ISBN 1-86074-627-6.
  • Tarasti, Eero. 1979. Myth and Music: A Semiotic Approach to the Aesthetics of Myth in Music, Especially that of Wagner, Sibelius and Stravinsky. Acta Musicologica Fennica 11; Religion and Society 51. Helsinki: Suomen Musiikkitieteellinen Seura; The Hague: Mouton. ISBN 978-90-279-7918-6.

External links edit

  • Written Tape Guides – The Contemporary Era, lectures by John Ronsheim (1927–1997), Antioch College