A term used in music to denote a multi-faceted but distinct and continuous tradition within 20th-century composition. It may also refer to 20th-century trends in aesthetic theory, scholarship and performing practice. Modernism is 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. The appropriateness of the term to describe a coherent and discrete movement has been underscored by the currency of the word ‘postmodern’, which refers to the music, art and ideas that emerged during the last quarter of the century as a reaction to Modernism (see Post-modernism). The word ‘Modernism’ has functioned throughout the century both polemically and analytically; although it is applied loosely to disparate musical styles, what links its many strands is a common debt to the historical context from which it emerged.
5. Social and cultural aspects.
6. World War I and its consequences.
LEON BOTSTEIN
Modernism first took shape as a historical phenomenon between 1883 and 1914. Before the death of Wagner, the term ‘modern’ was used interchangeably with ‘new’, ‘recent’ and ‘contemporary’. In its Wagnerian usage it also denoted an embrace of a wide palette of music as a means of conveying narrative and extra-musical content, as opposed to ‘absolute’ music. Its use in the early and middle 19th century echoed the controversies of the 18th-century debate in which the ancients were contrasted with the moderns. Scepticism about the quality and value of the new in art and music pervaded the early and middle 19th century, indicating the lasting influence of 18th-century criticism and the controversies surrounding post-revolutionary Romanticism (whose aesthetic response to a perceived moment of dramatic historical change – as in the criticism of Friedrich Schlegel and the painting of Caspar David Friedrich – was inconsistent, at once anticipating the ambitions of Modernism and reinvigorating a re-examination of antiquity and the Middle Ages). Neo-classicism thrived until 1830 and evolved into an eclectic but dominant 19th-century historicism. Doubt was cast on the cultural and aesthetic potential of the present, particularly in the context of rising rates of literacy and the expansion of the audience well beyond the ranks of the 18th-century aristocracy. Wagner himself used the term ‘modern’ in 1849 as an epithet directed against Meyerbeer as a way of characterizing grand opera’s cheap concession to popular and philistine taste. Art was being debased by those who sought to celebrate and exploit the spiritually corrupt aspects of modern life, including trade, industry and journalistically manipulated public opinion.
From the mid-century, however, following Baudelaire’s defence of Wagner in 1861 and use of the word ‘modern’ in 1863 (The Painter of Modern Life), the term came to signify, in a positive sense, a revolutionary avant garde that rejected historical models and confronted directly the overwhelming character of the new in contemporary life by penetrating beyond the surface of modernity. The link between Baudelaire’s notion of the modern and Wagner’s ideas about the artwork of the future was forged in the frequent application of the term to describe the work not only of Wagner but of composers who were influenced by him in the generation of Mahler and Strauss. By the early 1890s, the word was used equally in assigning praise and blame with respect to post-Wagnerian music that experimented with form, tonality and orchestration in a manner evocative of the radical qualities of contemporary culture and society. In instrumental music the modern was associated with the tone poem and large-scale work evocative of ideas and emotions using massive forces and novel instrumental effects. By 1900, the word had ceased to denote, in a generic sense, the new.
Issues of terminology aside, Modernism, throughout the 20th century, retained its initial intellectual debt to Wagnerian ideas and conceits regarding the link between music and history. The art of music was perceived to need to anticipate and ultimately to reflect the logic of history. In Wagner’s view, the imperative of art was a dynamic originality rooted in the past but transcending it. The history of music developed progressively through time, rendering initially novel and forward-looking styles dominant, only to witness that dominance undermined and superseded by the next wave of prescient change as history moved forwards. Success with the established audience of one’s time was not a criterion of aesthetic merit or historical significance. Legitimate originality in art was inherently progressive, oppositional and critical. It pierced the surface of reigning tastes, undermined them and revealed hidden truths and profound historical currents. Art true to its own time, whether called modern or the artwork of the future, forged a leading edge in history; it constituted a prophetic force for change often rejected by contemporary critics and connoisseurs. Consonant with such Wagnerian ideals, the first generation of 20th-century Modernist composers readily embraced the historical relativism implicit in the motto inscribed on Joseph Maria Olbrich’s 1897 Secession building in Vienna: Der Zeit ihre Kunst: Der Kunst ihre Freiheit (‘To each age its art: to art, its freedom’). Music shared with the other arts not only the obligation to engage the historical uniqueness of modern life but the need to bring forward the subjective and uniquely insightful experience of the creative artist, whose perceptions and experiences were deemed decisive as the substance of the aesthetic realm. Music was understood as crucial to the notion of an organic and encompassing art experience whose impact extended beyond mere aesthetic appreciation.
Despite the use of the term ‘modern’ in connection with Mahler (whose distortions of symphonic form, penchant for fragmentation and unconventional sonorities and use of instruments, including cowbells and hammers, were cited by later Modernists and their defenders such as Webern and Paul Bekker), Debussy (on account of his use of harmony and interest in non-Western music), Skryabin (also for harmonic originality) and Strauss (whose Salome and Elektra were considered thoroughly avant garde), these four figures were ultimately understood as precursors of 20th-century Modernism. By 1912 Strauss was viewed as having turned away from Modernism; Mahler died in 1911, Skryabin in 1915 and Debussy in 1918. Busoni, Schoenberg, Schreker and Stravinsky were recognized before 1914 as the first proponents of 20th-century Modernism. The selfconscious search in the years immediately before 1914 by composers and performers for a language of music adequate to and reflective of the contemporary moment revealed a conception of modernity dominated by the progress of science, technology and industry, and by positivism, mechanization, urbanization, mass culture and nationalism. A heightened sensitivity to the isolation and alienation of the individual and a concomitant intensity of personal emotions accompanied the sense of newness and discontinuity that pervaded the first years of the century.
The aesthetic reaction to modernity reflected not only enthusiasm but ambivalence and anxiety. Nietzsche’s critique of modernity was well known. Nevertheless, the shared assumption surrounding the subsequent debates over Modernism was that the present was far more radical in its contrasts with the immediate past than previous periods had been. Therefore the historical tastes and aesthetic styles characteristic of much mid- and late-19th-century painting, architecture and music were rejected. Overt departures from immediate historical precedents became hallmarks of early Modernism. Furthermore, given a pervasive sense of dread about societal and cultural consequences of modernity, the subjective experience of the artist, at the moment, became increasingly glorified. In this regard, early Modernism was indebted to turn-of-the-century advances in painting, particularly Impressionism and Expressionism. Varèse captured the subjective and political aspects of the Modernist credo accurately when he wrote, in 1917, ‘I dream of instruments obedient to my thought and which, with their contribution of a whole new world of unsuspected sounds, will lend themselves to the exigencies of my inner rhythm’, and in 1936, ‘the very newness of the mechanism of life is forcing our activities and our forms of human association to break with the traditions and methods of the past in the effort to adapt themselves to circumstances’.
The basic assumptions underlying the compositional traditions of the 19th century underwent scrutiny, particularly the concept and practice of tonality, the reliance on recognizable rhythmic regularities, the dependence on traditional instruments and sonic effects and the use of extended compositional forms, as in the case of Bruckner. Normative expectations regarding beauty in sound and timbre and meaning in musical expression were confronted, especially in matters of orchestration, the use of instruments and the voice vis-à-vis the techniques of post-Wagnerian composition. The link between music and narration particularly came under scrutinity. Modernity demanded the shattering of expectations, conventions, categories, boundaries and limits as well as empirical experimentation (following the example of science) and the confident exploration of the new. This would inspire the continuing search during the century for new systems of pitch organization as alternatives to tonality, and for new instruments, often the result of technological advances, from the theremin (1920) and the ondes martenot (1928) to the synthesizer and the computer. As the Italian futurist Luigi Russolo wrote in 1913, ‘We must break out of this narrow circle of pure musical sounds, and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds’. The employment of Sprechstimme by Schoenberg in Pierrot lunaire (1912) is one notable early example; text and sound no longer ran together along parallel descriptive logics.
Modernism in music was fuelled by more than aesthetic ambitions and the embrace of the uniquely new in music. A critique of contemporary cultural standards and the social uses of music as exemplified by the turn-of-the-century urban concert audience and public for music in the home was, from the start, a driving force behind early 20th-century compositional innovations. Reigning habits of listening were understood as too dependent on conservative expectations regarding music’s surface logic and its alluring, sensual and story-telling properties. Repetition, lush sonorities and a reliance on extra-musical narratives were chief targets in the turn-of-the-century discourse about music that differentiated, as Schoenberg argued, decoration and ornament from structure, and style from idea in the use of sounds alone. Contemporary taste appeared distorted by a dependence on false façades. The extensive and widespread bourgeois audience in Europe of concert-goers and amateurs before World War I was seen as addicted to art as comforting entertainment and affirmation, and unable and unwilling to confront the unique characteristics, transformative power and ethical character of true musical art. The popularity of third-rate operettas on the eve of World War I was just one symptom of this malaise. Music journalism was viewed as playing a nefarious role by claiming corrupt established compositional conventions as reflective of normative criteria of beauty in music. The social critique implicit in Modernist ideology created an uncomfortable and uneasy affinity between Modernism and conservative cultural criticism which, following Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869) and Max Nordau’s Entartung (1892, Eng. trans. 1895 as Degeneration) condemned mass society and the expansion of the audience for music and culture as responsible for the decline in standards, the corruption of taste and the encouragement of artistic mediocrity masquerading as the modern. Modernists and their defenders would never entirely escape the charge of intolerance, snobbery and élitism and a distaste for the democratization of culture made possible, ironically, by the technological advances of modernity, from printing to electronic reproduction and transmission.
From its inception, Modernism influenced not only the direction of musical compositions but also performing practices. A new rationalism and critical formalism emerged in the early 20th century that focussed on clarity, objectivity and historical and stylistic criticism with respect to a musical text. The improvisatory, seemingly over-inflected and boldly personal and expressive character of the late 19th-century performances of the reigning classical canon, particularly Beethoven, came under attack before 1914, notably from Heinrich Schenker. An austere, explicitly anti-sentimental Modernist approach to performance evolved at mid-century and came to dominate; examples include the conducting of Arturo Toscanini, George Szell, Hermann Scherchen and Fritz Reiner, the interpretative strategy of the Kolisch Quartet (and later the Juilliard and Guarneri Quartets), the pianism of Artur Schnabel, Rudolf Serkin and Glenn Gould and the refined approach to the violin displayed by Joseph Szigeti and Jascha Heifetz. Modernism helped impel and sustain a new obectivity towards the past and its attendant revisionism that profoundly influenced scholarship and principles of textual criticism and editing. Guido Adler’s critical construct of the methods and goals of musicology made him sympathetic to the innovations of Mahler, Schoenberg and his protégés, many of whom had been students of Adler in music history. The newness of Modernism, for Adler, writing in 1919, was justified as evidence for the patterns of historical development; therefore, as a ‘child of the times’, he found the tendency to ‘suppress living composers with inappropriate comparisons with works from the past’ unreasonable and intolerable. The later 20th-century penchant for historically based performing practices, pre-Classical repertory and period instruments can also be linked to Modernism. At stake in these trends were a reaction against Romanticism and a reassertion of the primacy of an inherent logic of musical materials. Likewise, late Romanitc historicisim in taste and subjective appropriation in performance were superseded by a revival of interest in pre-Classical eras, particularly medieval and Renaissance music. Scholarly objectivity with respect to history became a Modernist conceit.
The extensive commerce associated with musical life that had developed during the last quarter of the 19th century was held in the early 1900s as partially responsible for the prevalence of debased listening habits. Modernism was endorsed from the outset as an aesthetic strategy that fought against the domination and corruption of taste by business interests in the arts, particularly in concert management and music journalism and publishing. After 1918, Modernist composers sought refuge in new organizations, such as Schoenberg and Berg’s Verein für Musikalische Privataufführungen, Cowell and Varèse’s Pan American Association of Composers and the Copland and Sessions New York concerts. Modernism created a demand for new publishers and journals, leading to the establishment of the Arrow Press, Dreililien Verlag, New Music Series, Universal Edition, Editions Russes, New Music Quarterly, Modern Music and Musikblätter des Anbruchs. The selfconscious sense of an avant garde and the isolation from conventional commercial concert life (despite the notable advocacy of famous performers such as Koussevitzky, Klemperer and Stokowski) helped to widen a rift between popular and concert music that would plague Modernist composers throughout the century (see Avant garde). Modernism also alienated a large segment of the century’s professional performers. Intense hostility to most instrumentalists, singers and conductors came to characterize modernist composers, notably Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Sessions and Babbitt. In response, a select cadre of performers chose to link their careers explicitly with the Modernist avant garde, including the pianists Edward Steuermann, David Burge and Ursula Oppens, the violinists Louis Krasner, Rudolf Kolisch and Felix Galimir and the flautist Severino Gazzelloni, often working in small ensembles devoted to propagating Modernism.
In contrast to Modernism in painting (e.g. non-objectivism and abstraction) and architecture (functionalism from Adolf Loos to Le Corbusier), Modernism in music failed to alter fundamentally the tastes and practices of 20th-century mass culture. Film music and commercial advertising music did not come to reflect Modernist innovations in the way commercial design and illustration in visual media eventually appropriated new developments in 20th-century painting and culture. Only in the arenas of historical performing practice and music as academic discipline (in terms of theory and scholarship) did Modernism exert a wide influence and define standard practices.
In painting and literature, early 20th-century Modernism attacked realism and naturalism. Their counterparts in music were tonality, its link to narrative, and its formal consequences in, for example, sonata form and symphoinc tone poetry, even in the manner practised with wide success in the 1880s and 90s by Strauss. Schoenberg’s Kammersymphonie op.9 (1906) explicitly eschewed repetition, large-scale forces, tonal stability and extensive duration. In the early controversies over Modernist innovations, tonality was construed as the functional equivalent of conventional but spurious claims to objective external reality and a natural system of representation. The pre-1914 challenges (by Schoenberg and Ives) to the uses of tonality and its attendant conventions rejected the means by which the extra-musical had been represented, signified and illustrated so effectively and successfully by Wagner and Italian verismo composers. Modernist music shared with contemporary radical innovations in the other arts an affinity to new epistemological theories which questioned the conventional subject–object construct. Theories of relativism, psychoanalysis, the limits of language and logical fallibility thrived alongside logical positivism as inspirations to Modernist experiments. Likewise, the work of Hermann Helmholtz and Ernst Mach on the physics of sound, the physiology of hearing and the psychology of sensation supported the arguments against viewing the logic and conventions of Western music, especially tonality, as objective and natural. So too did early 20th-century forays into anthropology that described and highlighted non-Western musical cultures not based on tonality.
Although narrative possibilities of music were not entirely rejected by the first generation of Modernists, the materials and strategies of musical representation underwent drastic change, away from attempts at direct allusion and correlation to an ‘inward’ relationship and ‘higher’ parallelism, as Schoenberg put it. In music, early Modernism thrived alongside Expressionism in poetry, drama and painting. Modernism also gained impetus from early 20th-century mystical enthusiasms and philosophies, such as theosophy, as well as from orientalist exoticism, primitivism and symbolism in poetry (Maurice Maeterlinck, Richard Dehmel, Stephane Mallarmé), dance (the choreography of Fokine, Massine and Nizhinsky) and the visual arts, including set design (the designs by Alfred Roller for Mahler’s operatic productions in Vienna from 1902 to 1907 and the pre-war work of Nicholas Roerich and Leon Bakst). In dramatic works from the early 1900s (e.g. Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle, 1911, and Schoenberg’s Die glückliche Hand, 1913) one can discern an aesthetic which reasserted absolutist non-representational musical aesthetics and revealed a new range in the use of musical materials in the context of operatic form. Schoenberg wrote in 1912: ‘There are relatively few people who are capable of understanding, purely in terms of music, what music has to say. The assumption that a piece of music must summon up images of one sort or another, and that if these are absent the piece of music has not been understood or is worthless, is as widespread as only the false and banal can be’. It is not surprising therefore that a formalist bias came to dominate Modernism after 1920.
Modernism was first publicly debated as a distinct historical phenomenon before World War I as a result of several prominent controversies tied to musical events between 1908 and 1913: the Viennese and Berlin premières of works by Schoenberg (particularly his Quartet no.2 and Pierrot lunaire), the Paris première of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps (at which Debussy was present) and the so-called ‘scandal’ concert of 1913 organized by Schoenberg in Vienna of music by himself, Berg, Webern, Zemlinsky and Mahler. These last two events were so contentious that police intervention was required. One leading Viennese critic, Ludwig Karpath, claimed that Schoenberg and his disciples were not only destroying music and violating true standards of beauty and art, they were insulting the audience and explicitly challenging its competence to judge music. Busoni published his Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst, a defence of progressive developments in the materials of music and methods of composition in 1907. Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre (1911) espoused the notions of the ‘emancipation of the dissonance’ and ‘extended tonality’. Within a year of the end of World War I, a debate over Modernism was well under way, particularly as a result of Pfitzner’s two blistering pamphlets, Futuristengefahr (1917) and Die neue ästhetik der musikalischen Impotenz: ein Verwesungssymptom? (1920). With Pfitzner, a permanent link between politics and aethetics was forged in the debate over Modernism that was to help define the direction of Modernism for most of the century. Faced with an initial resistance by the public and the critics, opponents decried the arrogance and arbitrary radicalism of the break with the past and tradition, while the innovators defended themselves by an appeal to history as it ought to be understood – the Wagnerian imperative to change and therefore, ironically, an anti-Wagnerian return to the principles of pre-Romantic classical composition – or by references to the unmet spiritual demands of the contemporary moment. The view of Brahms thus underwent revision; he became a model of purely musical innovation.
World War I was crucial to the development of Modernism. The shock of the devastation and carnage, in addition to the instability and hardship of the postwar years, deepened the impulse among composers, particularly in France and Germany, to use art as a vehicle for protest and criticism. The trajectory of pre-war Modernism seemed vindicated and justified. A radical break and the shedding of the veneer of objective aesthetic norms and conventions through fundamental musical innovation (e.g. the abandonment of tonality) and the explicit distortion of traditional expectations emerged as legitimate responses to the irrationality and cruelty of contemporary life. Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin (1919, orchd 1924) and Berg’s Wozzeck (1922) were crucial and influential examples. The positive embrace of technology, as well as the perceived need to abandon old distinctions between music and noise (audible in the use of string instruments to create percussive and atmospheric sounds) ran parallel with a heightened curiosity about non-Western musical practices and instruments. Not only the entire 19th century but pre-war Expressionism came under fire, which in turn fuelled a neo-classicism that sought inspiration in the search for the new in non-Wagnerian historical precedents, particularly models from the 18th century. As Schoenberg’s development of the 12-note system of composition (a strategy experimented with at the same time by J.M. Hauer) after World War I implies, during the interwar years Modernism and neo-classicism were allied through a common rejection of all forms of Romanticism. Schoenberg’s reputation as not only radical but conservative was based on his advocacy of the primacy of counterpoint and his reassessment of Brahms – long considered the arch-conservative of the 19th century – as a progressive adherent to the 18th-century principle of developing variation and the autonomy of music.
By 1933 five distinct strands of Modernism had come into being: (i) the Second Viennese School, made up of Schoenberg and his followers, particularly Berg and Webern; (ii) the French-Russian axis, dominated by Stravinsky; (iii) German Expressionism, which included Busoni and the young Paul Hindemith; (iv) indigenous Modernisms, characterized by Ives in America, Bartók in Hungary, Szymanowski in Poland, Janáček and Martinů in postwar Czechoslovakia and Carlos Chavez in Mexico; and (v) experimentalism, characteristic of Hába, Varèse and Cowell, that led to the exploration of microtonality, the embrace of ambient sound and the machine and a fascination with non-Western musics and technology. These strands often came together in the work of particular composers. Many early Modernists, including Stravinsky, Bartók and Szymanowski, asserted the radical and modernist possibilities inherent in rural folk and pre-modern traditions.
Although these five types continued to define Modernism for the remainder of the century, the Viennese school was of the greatest significance. It inspired a powerful third generation after Berg and Webern, including the work of Nikos Skalkottas, Egon Wellesz, Stefan Wolpe, Ernst Krenek, K.A. Hartmann and Roberto Gerhard. The French tradition continued with Messiaen, Boulez and Henri Dutilleux. Particularly important has been the intersection between national and local traditions and Modernism, as in the cases of György Ligeti (Hungary), Witold Lutosławski (Poland), Harrison Birtwistle (England), Alberto Ginastera (Argentina) and Morton Feldman (USA). The experimental dimension witnessed particular vitality in the last quarter of the century, especially as a result of advances in technology (sometimes employed in connection with the postwar extension of serialism beyond pitch) and, in recent years, the influence of rock music. Key figures include Conlon Nancarrow (who generated an entire repertory using the player piano) and George Crumb (whose theatrical, exotic sound textures were influential in the 1970s), La Monte Young and Terry Riley in minimalism, Roger Reynolds and Annea Lockwood in conceptual music, Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky, and later Morton Subotnik, Charles Wuorinen, Mario Davidovsky, Richard Teitelbaum and David Rosenboom in electronic music (including the use of synthesizers and computers), and John Zorn, Frank Zappa and Anthony Braxton in the connection with rock and jazz.
The political implications of the debate over Modernism before 1914 became far more significant after the war. In the interwar years, musical Modernism became allied with progressive and radical left-wing politics. By the mid-1930s, conservative, anti-Modernist compositional aesthetics had become part of the official doctrine of fascism and Soviet communism under Stalin. Nazi ideology (see Nazism) and the Soviet construct of Socialist realism attacked Modernism as anti-nationalist, unnatural, élitist, degenerate, semitic, foreign and subversive. The leading conservative composers in Germany, Pfitzner and Strauss (who sought to craft a synthesis of Modernism and populism), went along with the Nazi regime, as did most of their talented younger colleagues (e.g. Carl Orff and Werner Egk) who explicitly suppressed any evident residual Modernist tendencies. The Russian Modernism of the 1920s and early 30s – the work of Nikolay Roslavets, Aleksandr Mosolov and the young Shostakovich – was suppressed by 1936. In 1938 Modernism was officially banned and declared ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis (see Entartete Musik). In 1948 Stalin, through the notorious Zhdanov decree, reaffirmed the attitude of the 1930s and once again decried Modernism as exemplary of bourgeois individualism and empty formalism. The irony in the attack by Hitler and Stalin was that by the late 1920s the continuing failure of Modernism to gain a wide audience had led to defections (in terms of compositional practice) within the Modernist camp by composers on the political left, notably Hanns Eisler and Kurt Weill. Nonetheless, the close link between fascism and totalitarianism and a reactionary musical aesthetic, as well as the intense ideological campaign against it, lent Modernism a unique prestige and visibility in the 1930s that continued well into the postwar era, in marked contrast to its lack of success with the public.
In part as a result of the political significance and ethical overtones of Modernism, its moment of relative dominance among composers occurred in the late 1940s, the 50s and the 60s, the decades most influenced by the shock of the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Enthusiasm for post-Webern serialism and experimentalism thrived. In this context T.W. Adorno (who studied with Berg and Steuermann) emerged as the most influential postwar theoretical advocate of Modernism. Adorno focussed on Schoenberg and his school, which he regarded as the only true and historically valid progressive school of composition. Unlike Schoenberg himself, he dismissed Stravinsky and Bartók (who never entirely abandoned tonality as a framework) as false responses to modernity. If music was to follow its true historical logic and fulfil its political and ethical function, it had to resist the regressive habits of listening and the fetishistic use of music characteristic of advanced capitalism and institutionalized by fascism (e.g. Tin Pan Alley, jazz, Hollywood, Broadway and classical music concerts and radio broadcasts that repeated a select number of masterpieces from the standard repertory). The conflict between the audience and the rejection of inherited conventions of musical expression became virtues and signs of authenticity. Only by resisting an aesthetic that exploited music’s power to affirm active collaboration with evil and to encourage passive submission to injustice, exploitation and oppression could 20th-century music realize the inherent liberating power of art. Adorno claimed that Schoenberg’s creation of serial technique and Webern’s extension of it in the use of silence, duration and discontinuities made Schoenberg, as he himself asserted, the true prophet of the 20th century. Ultimately, through an encounter with Modernist 20th-century music, the contemporary public could once again learn to appreciate the essence of Beethoven and the canonic repertory so highly prized but abused by reactionaries as a foil against innovation. In the 1950s Modernists such as Milton Babbitt argued that a mass public was irrelevant and construed the isolation of Modernism from the general public and its new status as music for an élite as a virtue.
After 1945 the implications of Webern’s music – 12-note composition, short forms, transparent textures, delicate sonorities, fragmentation, experiments with time and the use of silence as an element of punctuation – defined not only the legacy of Viennese Modernism but became emblematic of Modernism per se. Even Stravinsky and Copland were motivated in the 1950s and 60s to employ serial techniques in their music. The French-Russian trajectory had evolved into the neo-classicism exemplified by the teaching of Nadia Boulanger. Messiaen helped sustain a distinct postwar French Modernist influence. The German Expressionist tradition continued with Henze and Hartmann but was itself influenced by the Schoenberg school. The overwhelming majority of postwar German, Italian and French Modernists, including Dallapiccola, Stockhausen, Boulez, Maderna, Pousseur, Nono and Berio and the participants in the most influential Modernist festivals of the late 1940s, 50s and 60s (the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik at Darmstadt and Musiktage für zeitgenössische Tonkunst in Donaueschingen), followed the path charted by Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School. In postwar America the European émigrés, including Schoenberg, Hindemith and Krenek, exerted a powerful influence that often intersected with indigenous Modernism. Experimentalism, conceptualism and radical minimalism flourished (e.g. the music of Lou Harrison, Harry Partch and Steve Reich). Cowell and Cage became influential as composers and theoreticians. Modernism encompassed electronic music, adaptations of non-Western musics (e.g. in the music of Colin McPhee), new forms of notation and chance music. The work of Sessions, Ligeti and Elliott Carter reflects a brilliant synthesis of indigenous impulses and also European Modernist techniques. The postwar music of Stockhausen and Xenakis mirrors the integration of technology and modern scientific theory with earlier Modernist strategies. In America, Perspectives of New Music became the leading postwar academic journal of advocacy for Modernism.
The populism evident in the political radicalism of the 1960s in Europe and America shattered the inherited mid-century linkage of Modernism and progressive politics. As the political overtones of pre-1945 and 20th-century Modernism receded from memory and rock and commercial folk music took an oppositional, political significance in both west and east Europe, the moral edge of Modernism weakened, leaving composers free to become more eclectic. Modernism’s status at the end of the century stood in stark contrast to the expectations generated after both world wars. From the mid-1920s, Modernism was widely accepted as the defining aspect of 20th-century music and the century’s dominant musical signature. The legitimacy of its aesthetics and the significance of its genesis provided the foundation for the standard historical paradigm and narrative concerning 20th-century music: for example, the music of Strauss between 1912 and 1949 was, as Adorno argued, a vestigial phenomenon out of step with history. However, this would change, since from the mid-1970s Modernism was in retreat and pluralism came to characterize the evolution of 20th-century concert music. Deep concern for the health and survival of high art concert music in Europe and North America during the last decades of the century only helped diminish the interest in Modernism. The emergence of postmodernism and neo-romanticism in the last quarter of the century forced a revision of the accepted historical account. So-called conservative 20th-century music, dismissed as secondary and irrelevant in the postwar climate of opinion shaped by the views of Schoenberg, Adorno, Leibowitz, Babbitt and Boulez, began to return to the repertory and receive serious critical assessment. Copland, Barber, Britten and Shostakovich increasingly appear central to any musical characterization of the century. Modernism may end up as only one of many competing 20th-century trends and not the century’s dominant voice. However, even if Modernism and its repertory end up at the periphery, it has consistently framed the debate about the nature and future of high art musical composition.
Modernism’s failure vis-à-vis the other arts to gain wide acceptance (which has frequently been held responsible for the relative decline in the significance of all concert music during the last third of the century) can be linked to the dramatic shifts in musical culture resulting from technological advances. The 20th century witnessed the explosion of novel forms of sound reproduction and distribution and the creation of a mass market for recorded sound. A premium on familiarity and ease of listening took hold as a decline in older forms of music education escalated. The piano was replaced by the radio and gramophone as the central instruments of musical culture. The beneficiary of this was not Modernism, which depended on the capacity to follow sound, pitch changes and complex textures, but anti-Modernist popular music, ranging from the musical to the hit song, film music and, later, rock and popular music as well as the conservative tradition of musical composition. The defections from Modernism by prominent composers were often based on the very political grounds that argued on its behalf. Copland, like Weill and Eisler, cited his progressive political commitments when he turned from Modernism in the 1930s after realizing the gap between Modernism and the mass audience. After the 1960s, George Rochberg, Philip Glass, David del Tredici and Krzysztof Penderecki abandoned Modernism on account of its inability to secure a significant public. Although by the end of the century Modernism was in retreat, it continued in the work of American and European composers, particularly under the aegis of Boulez and IRCAM in Paris. Modernism’s range at the end of the century stretched from the conceptual music of Pauline Oliveros to the brilliant and original experimental synthesis of Japanese and Western Modernism in Toru Takemitsu’s work. Notable late 20th-century exponents include George Benjamin, Jacob Druckman, Brian Ferneyhough, George Perle, Wolfgang Rihm, Richard Wernick, Richard Wilson and Ralph Shapey.
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