Modernism (music)

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Modernism in music is characterized by a desire for or belief in progress and science, surrealism, anti-romanticism, political advocacy, general intellectualism, and/or a breaking with the past or common practice — Ezra Pound'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 World War Two, and then being gradually displaced by postmodern music.

Defining musical modernism

Musicologist Carl Dahlhaus 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....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 [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"...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, calling them all "late romantics" in order to supply a veneer of internal unity to an age fraught with stylistic contradictions and conflicts. (Dahlhaus 1989, 334)

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 & New Objectivity, Hyperrealism & Abstractionism, Neoclassicism & Neobarbarism, Futurism & the mythic 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 extend the period of musical modernism to 1930, and apply the term "postmodernism" to the period after that year (Karolyi 1994, 135).

Examples of modernism in music

• Science and sci-fi

Futurists such as Ferruccio Busoni and Luigi Russolo looked to a future of music liberated to the point of being able to use any sound, even "noises" such as factory and mechanical sounds, while Edgard Varèse created the Poème Électronique, premièred in the Le Corbusier designed Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair with 400 speakers, designed with assistance by Iannis Xenakis.

• Extended techniques and sounds

John Cage and Lou Harrison wrote works for percussion orchestras, Harrison eventually writing for and building gamelans, while Cage popularized extended techniques on the piano in his prepared piano pieces. Harry Partch built his own ensemble of instruments, mostly percussion and string instruments, to allow the performance of his theatrical ("corporeal") justly tuned microtonal music.

• Speech and singing

Schwitters' Ursonate (1921-32) develops from words like "fmsbwtözäu", taken from the "poster-poems" of Raoul Hausmann.

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".

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).

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

External links

• Audio lectures on the history of the Modern musical era by Prof. John Ronsheim

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