Modernism (music)

Periods of Western classical music
Early
Medieval	(500–1400)
Renaissance	(1400–1600)
Baroque	(1600–1760)
Common practice
Baroque	(1600–1760)
Classical	(1730–1820)
Romantic	(1815–1910)
Impressionist	(1875–1925)
Modern and contemporary
Modern	(1890–1930)
20th century	(1901–2000)
Contemporary	(1975–present)
21st century	(2001–present)

In music, the term "modernism" refers generally to the period of change and development in musical language that occurred at or around the turn of the 20th century, a period of diverse reactions in challenging and reinterpreting older categories of music, innovations that lead 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" (Metzer 2009, 3). Its leading feature is a "linguistic plurality", which is to say that no one musical language ever assumed a dominant position (Morgan 1984, 443).

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 [emphasis added](2010, 37)

Examples include the celebration of Arnold Schoenberg's transcendence of tonality in chromatic post-tonal and twelve-tone works and Igor Stravinsky's move beyond metrical rhythm (Campbell 2010, 37).

Recent musicological approaches

Musicologist Carl Dahlhaus describes modernism as:

an obvious point of historical discontinuity....The "breakthrough" Mahler, Strauss and Debussy implying 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. (Dahlhaus 1989, 334)

Later approaches

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)

Time period

Other writers regard musical modernism as an historical period extending from about 1890 to 1930, and apply the term "postmodernism" to the period after that year (Karolyi 1994, 135; Meyer 1994, 331–32).

Still other writers assert that modernism is not attached to any historical period, but rather is "an attitude of the composer; a living construct that can evolve with the times" (McHard 2008, 14).

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 coined the neologisms "too-muchness" and "too-littleness" to describe the poles between which writings about aesthetic perception tend to swing (Ferneyhough 1995, 117).

Examples

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 (Albright 2004, 11):

• Expressionism
• New Objectivity
• Hyperrealism
• Abstractionism
• Neoclassicism
• Neobarbarism
• Futurism
• Mythic Method

See also

• Neoconservative postmodernism

Sources

• Albright, Daniel. 2000. Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-01253-0 (cloth) ISBN 0-226-01254-9 (pbk)
• Albright, Daniel. 2004. Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-01267-0.
• Anon. n.d. "Poème electronique". The EMF Institute website (Archive, accessed 27 February 2012).
• Ashby, Arved. 2004. "Modernism Goes to the Movies". In The Pleasure of Modernist Music: Listening, Meaning, Intention, Ideology, edited by Arved Ashby, 345-86. Eastman Studies in Music. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. ISBN 1-58046-143-3.
• Botstein, Leon. "Modernism". Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy. <http://www.grovemusic.com> (subscription access)
• Campbell, Edward (2010). Boulez, Music and Philosophy. ISBN 978-0-521-86242-4.
• Cavell, Stanley. 1976. "Music Discomposed", in his Must We Mean What We Say?^{[citation needed]}. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-29048-1 (cloth), ISBN 0-521-21116-6 (pbk). Updated edition, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-521-82188-6 (cloth), ISBN 0-521-52919-0 (pbk). Cited in^{[citation needed]} 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.
• Drury, Stephen. n.d. "In a Landscape". http://www.stephendrury.com/ (Accessed 27 February 2012).
• Ferneyhough, Brian. 1995. Collected Writings, edited by James Boros and Richard Toop. New York: Routledge. ISBN 3-7186-5577-2.
• 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.
• McHard, James L. 2008. The Future of Modern Music: A Philosophical Exploration of Modernist Music in the 20th Century and Beyond, 3rd edition. Livonia, Michigan: Iconic Press ISBN 978-0-9778195-1-5.
• 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. 1984. "Secret Languages: The Roots of Musical Modernism". Critical Inquiry 10, no. 3 (March): 442–61.
• Russolo, Luigi. 1913. L'arte dei rumori: manifesto futurista. Milan: Direzione del Movimento Futurista.

Further reading

• Albright, Daniel. 2011. "Musical Motives". In The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, second edition, edited by Michael H. Levenson, 232–44. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 1-107-01063-2 (cloth); ISBN 0-521-28125-3 (pbk).
• Bernstein, David W., John Rockwell, and Johannes Goebel. 2008. The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-garde. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-24892-2 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-520-25617-0 (pbk).
• Botstein, Leon. 1985. "Music and Its Public: Habits of Listening and the Crisis of Musical Modernism in Vienna, 1870–1914". Ph.D. thesis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.
• Bucknell, Brad. 2001. Literary Modernism and Musical Aesthetics: Pater, Pound, Joyce, and Stein. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-66028-9.
• Despic, Dejan, and Melita Milin (eds.). 2008. Rethinking Musical Modernism: Proceedings of the International Conference Held from October 11 to 13, 2007 / Muzicki modernizam—nova tumacenja : zbornik radova sa naucnog skupa odzanog od 11. do 13. oktobra 2007. Belgrade: Institute of Musicology. ISBN 978-86-7025-463-3.
• Duncan, William Edmondstoune. 1917. Ultra-Modernism in Music: A Treatise on the Latter-day Revolution in Musical Art. Schirmer's Red Series of Music Text Books. London: Winthrop Rogers.
• Earle, Benjamin. 2011. Luigi Dallapiccola and Musical Modernism in Fascist Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-84403-1.
• Frisch, Walter. 2005. German Modernism: Music and the Arts. California Studies in 20th-century Music. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-24301-3.
• Griffiths, Paul. 1981. Modern Music: The Avant Garde since 1945. New York: George Braziller. ISBN 0-8076-1018-6 (pbk.)
• Sitsky, Larry. 2002. Music of the Twentieth-Century Avant-garde: A Biocritical Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-29689-8.
• Smith Brindle, Reginald. 1987. The New Music: The Avant-garde Since 1945, second edition. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-315471-4 (cloth) ISBN 0-19-315468-4 (pbk).
• Straus, Joseph Nathan. 1990. Remaking the Past: Musical Modernism and the Influence of the Tonal Tradition. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-75990-7.
• Watkins, Glenn. 1994. Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, Culture, and Collage from Stravinsky to the Postmodernists. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-74083-1.
• Youmans, Charles Dowell. 2005. Richard Strauss's Orchestral Music and the German Intellectual Tradition: The Philosophical Roots of Musical Modernism. Bloomington : Indiana University Press. ISBN 0-253-34573-1.

External links

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