Modernism (music)

A caricature of the infamous Scandal Concert, conducted by Arnold Schoenberg on 31 March 1913.
Major eras of
Western classical music
Early music
Medieval c. 500–1400
Transition to Renaissance
Renaissance c. 1400–1600
Transition to Baroque
Common practice period
Baroque c. 1600–1750
Transition to Classical
Classical c. 1730–1820
Transition to Romantic
Romantic c. 1800–1910
Transition to Modernism
New music
Modernism from c. 1890
Contemporary from c. 1945
 • 20th-century
 • 21st-century

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 musical language, or modernist style, ever assumed a dominant position.[2]

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.[6] However, there are other historians and critics who argue that modernism was revived after World War II. For example, Paul Griffiths notes that, while Modernism "seemed to be a spent force" by the late 1920s, after World War II, "a new generation of composers—Boulez, Barraqué, Babbitt, Nono, Stockhausen, Xenakis" revived modernism".[7]

  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. ^ Paul Griffiths, "Modernism", The Oxford Companion to Music, ed. Alison Latham. Oxford University Press, 2002.