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Prelude: Music and Modernism
1890-1940
saw profound changes in European and American societies and
their art
Changes were outgrowths of trends such as the collapse of
Romantic political aspirations in 1848, accelerating industrialization, and
increasingly pronounced nationalism.
Came to a climax with World War I (1914-18) and World War II
(1939-1945)
Some responses from composers pushed Wagner’s ideas of
expression even further
Others turned to the traditional (think Brahms)
The modernists shocked audiences with their experimentation
and innovation
The second group would be a persistent reaction to the
newness of modernism
Progress and Uncertainty
Industrialization and the Emergence of a modern
nation-state: 2 historical “facts”
By the early 20th century, automobile and air
travel were in their early stages of development, as were telephones, movies,
and sound recordings.
What were previously rural societies ruled by stable
aristocracies, turned into modern nations, dominated by urban centers run by
self-made entrepreneurs
The developments happened very rapidly
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the musical developments are a positive outcome of the
above, World War I is arguably a negative
As much as the rich profited from these advancements, many
artists focused on the extreme conditions of the industrial poor (such as the
novels of Charles Dickens and Karl Marx)
Also weaponry developed: tanks, submarines, and chemical
weapons
We see the impact of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity
Also Darwinian evolutionary theory still is in debate today
Psychological theories of Sigmund Freud suggest that our
actions are dictated by unconscious drives and irrational forces.
Response of Modernism
Thus, some question the existing rules and assumptions in
the arts and music
One assumption is that visual art had to represent something
from the external world
So the materials of painting and other arts could be used
for themselves and a world of abstract painting opened up (also called
“nonrepresentational”)
Avant-garde artists developed whole new languages for art:
cubism (e.g. Georges Braque or Pablo Picasso)
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Also in literature and poetry, writers were free from the
confines of ordinary sentence structure, syntax, and grammar, emphasizing
Freud’s discovery of our inner self.
A very famous example is the stream-of-consciousness novel Ulysses by James Joyce, he even invented
words for his last novel, Finnegans Wake.
“Sheshell ebb music wayriver she flows”
We do the same in music with our ideas of tonality, melody,
and harmony.
Some composers turn away from the presentation of meter and
rhythm, etc.
There was a tendency for these artists to run in certain
circles or groups, and not just groups of likeminded composers, but also
authors, poets, artists, etc.
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Literature and Art Before WWI
New languages for art were “unquestionably and
unapologetically difficult.
Avant-garde art became detached from music’s public
audience.
The art is an abstraction
This abstraction led to a separation of technique from
expression
This was a welcomed relief from the entirety of emotionalism
of the Romantic era.
These artists sought “objectivity”
Personally, I like to describe it as music or art that does
not tell you how to feel (telegraph an emotion)
The public tends to see these works as cold and dry, but
this is not really so if you know how to take it in
E.g. abstract painter Piet Mondrian
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Composer Igor Stravinsky was known for his provocative
statements extolling objectivity and attacking Romantic music.
He composed with brisk, mechanical rhythms that oppose the
Romantic ideal of rubato.
Several composers became interested in machine rhythms:
Ballet mécanique –
Georges Antheil
The Iron Foundry –
A.V. Mosolov
Pacific 231 –
Arthur Honegger (a locomotive)
And an Italian group called Futurists who write music with
industrial noises
Impressionists and Symbolists
Modernism began in the late 19th century and
peaked in the 20th
Impressionism is the best-known movement, dating from the
1870s
Impressionist painters include Manet, Monet, and Cézanne
They tried to capture the actual, perceived qualities of
light (washed out and overly bright at times, dim and dull at others), they
thought of themselves as “realists”
Rebelling against realism were the symbolists: they stressed
words out of the context of a sentence that ambiguously and vaguely referenced
an endless possibility of interpretations and sound colors
E.g. from Stéphane Mallermé:
With pure nails brighty
flashing
their onyx
Anguish at midnight
holds
up (Lucifer!)
A multitude of dreams
burnt
by the Phoenix.
Symbolists were of course fascinated by the leitmotivs of
Wagner, musical symbols, and although Wagner was fairly conventional with
tonality (harmony), he was unconventional with form and structure (think of
these symbolists breaking down from normal sentence/prose structures).
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Composer Claude Debussy is often called an impressionist
because of his fragmentary motives and little flashes of tone color, but he can
also rightly be called a symbolist, since his aesthetic is defined by
suggestion, rather than statement.
E.g. Prelude to the
Afternoon of a Faun on a poem by Mallarmé.
Expressionism and Fauves
Russian-born painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) belonged
to a German movement called expressionism.
By divorcing art from everyday literalism, they sought to
get to the crux of human expression.
For how do you convey psychological states of Anguish or
hysteria in music?
Parallel to the expressionists in Vienna, in Paris there was
a movement called Les Fauves “the wild beasts,” who experimented with
distorted, primitive images.
Think of the abstraction of Pablo Picasso before he turned
to cubism.
Composers too explored the ideas of violence and barbarism
in their music such as Hungarian composer Béla Bartók and Igor Stravinsky in
his primitive ballet The Rite of Spring.
Modernist Music before WWI
Interestingly, music never had to deal with a connection to
reality in quite the same way as painting/art or literature, however that can
be a negative because we tend to expect to enjoy music instantaneously (beat,
harmony, rhythm, melody) because it is so much more inherently abstract.
All of the music we have previously explored is based on
those elements above (in parenthesis), as are popular and folk songs, but
modernist music moves away from these norms.
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For European Music before WWI, we emphasize developments in
melody, harmony, and tonality, the main preoccupations of the avant-garde.
Developments in tone color and rhythm, musical sonority and
musical time, dominated the later stage of Modernist music after WWII.
