Modernism (music)

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 tradition or common practice. Ezra Pound's modernist slogan, "Make it new," in music. Modern music is often thought to begin with, or just after, Debussy's impressionism, rising to rhetorical, if not commercial, dominance after World War Two, and then being gradually superseded by post-modern music.

Examples of modernism in music

See: List of modernistic pieces.

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Expansion and destruction of tonality

Modernist movements include expansion to common practice tonality, such as Debussy, Strauss, Mahler, the young Schoenberg, and the polytonality of Darius Milhaud, Paul Hindemith, and Ives. Alternatives to common practice include the twelve tone technique of the older Arnold Schoenberg and pupils, the serialism of Milton Babbitt and Pierre Boulez, as well as the high dissonance of Carl Ruggles, Ruth Crawford-Seeger, and Charles Seeger's dissonant counterpoint and Henry Cowell's tone clusters.

Related Topics:
Darius Milhaud - Paul Hindemith - Twelve tone technique - Arnold Schoenberg - Serialism - Milton Babbitt - Pierre Boulez - Carl Ruggles - Ruth Crawford-Seeger - Charles Seeger - Dissonant counterpoint - Henry Cowell - Tone cluster

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Comprehensiveness and depth

Gustav Mahler attempted extreme comprehensiveness and depth, to write the music of the whole world.

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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 Varese gave his pieces scientific names such as Hyperprism and Intégrales, comparing the musical structures to crystals, before creating electronic tape pieces such as Poème Électronique, premiered in the Le Corbusier designed Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair with 400 speakers, designed with assistance by Iannis Xenakis. Xenakis himself applied mathematical concepts to the composition of music.

Related Topics:
Futurists - Ferruccio Busoni - Luigi Russolo - Sound - Noise - Edgard Varese - Le Corbusier - Iannis Xenakis

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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. Alois Haba specialized in alternative equal temperaments rather than the standard twelve-tone equal temperament and Ives wrote quarter tone pieces for piano.

Related Topics:
John Cage - Lou Harrison - Percussion - Gamelan - Extended technique - Prepared piano - Harry Partch - Justly - Microtonal music - Equal temperament - Quarter tone

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Speech and singing

One of the aesthetical boundaries tested was that between speech and singing, with composers such as Leos Janacek, Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Harry Partch suggesting greater attention to and use of speech in music. Berg wrote Wozzeck using Schoenberg's Spreichsteime, Janacek based his melodies and motifs upon rhythms and inflections of Hungarian speech, and Partch devised his first just intonation instruments partly so as to play the fine pitch inflections of speech.

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Artists who were non-professional composers also wrote music with an emphasis on speech. Ezra Pound wrote a monophonically chanted opera, T.S. Eliot wrote "The Music of Poetry" (1942), while dada artist Kurt Schwitters wrote "speech-music" that proved highly influential on later sound poets such as Ursonate: Rondo (1921-32), based on a single word, fmsbwtözäu, from a Raoul Hausmann poem.

Related Topics:
Kurt Schwitters - Raoul Hausmann

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Visual art and music

Schoenberg was a painter, while dada and futurist visual artists such as Jean Cocteau and Luigi Russolo wrote music. Theodor Adorno accused Igor Stravinsky's music of being a "pseudomorphism of painting." Xenakis created the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World Fair after his earlier piece Metastasis. The ballet became more respected during the modernist period, see Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, and the development of the film industry created a market and outlet for film composers such as communist Hanns Eisler who borrowed Brecht and Weill's ideas of alienation from the theater.

Related Topics:
Pseudomorphism - Emile Jaques-Dalcroze - Hanns Eisler

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Individualism

Many modernists are ardent individualists, such as Varese, transcendentalist Charles Ives, Conlon Nancarrow, who became an expatriot in Mexico after fighting in the Spanish Civil War, and Elliott Carter. Carter composes atonal music with complex rhythms and often highly individualized parts, but refuses to be confined by writing twelve tone or serial music.

Related Topics:
Individualist - Transcendental - Charles Ives - Conlon Nancarrow - Elliott Carter - Atonal - Rhythm

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Ethnomusicology and political advocacy

Bela Bartok devoted much of his time to the study and preservation in recording of Hungarian folk music, which influenced his music, while Ruth Crawford-Seeger abandoned modernist composition for years while working as an ethnomusicologist studying, transcribing, and setting folk music.

Related Topics:
Bela Bartok - Hungarian folk music - Ethnomusicologist - Folk music

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The Seegers were communists, while Ives was, politically, blatantly populist, if androcentric, and considered that some insurance should be affordable for everyone. He petitioned William Howard Taft in 1920 to transform the presidential election into a national referendum. Schoenberg wrote a Zionist play about the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Africa. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was one of the first fascists in Italy.

Related Topics:
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti - Fascist

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Neoclassicism

Igor Stravinsky abandoned the "Dyonysian" modernism of his early work The Rite of Spring for a more "Apollonian" neo-classicism. Aaron Copland shifted from a highly dissonant modernist style to the populism of many of his works.

Related Topics:
Igor Stravinsky - The Rite of Spring - Aaron Copland

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George Perle sees a "common practice" in the, "shared premise of the harmonic equivalence of inversionally symmetrical pitch-class relations," among modernist composers such as Varese, Alban Berg, Bartok, Schoenberg, Alexander Scriabin, Stravinsky, and Anton Webern.

Related Topics:
George Perle - Alban Berg - Alexander Scriabin - Anton Webern

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