Prelude: Music and Modernism

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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 20^th 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 19^th century and peaked in the 20^th

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.