5.20 Music and Modernism

• @@1890-1940@@
  • WWI and WWII
• Both bolder expression and technique and “new vitality” in traditional techniques

Varieties of Modernism

• @@Modernist/ism@@ refers to “a special self-consciousness,” and artists and intellectuals who “insisted on” anti-traditionalism
• Claude Debussy, Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky
• @@Avant-garde@@ (“vanguard”), a military term repurposed to describe the activity of radical artists and thinkers
  • Not all modernist composers, just some

Progress and Uncertainty

• @@Industrialization@@ and the emergence of nation-states were factors influencing 19th century music

  • “Confidence in progress”

• The 20th century brought the development of our modern technologies

• There was development in @@weaponry@@ too (Civil War, WWs)

• Einstein’s theory of relativity

• WWI brought “horrifying” @@nationalism@@

• Charles Darwin (evolution) lead to a religious “crisis”

• Sigmund Freud had psychological theories

The Response of Modernism

• @@Rules@@ and assumptions surrounding the arts were @@challenged@@
• The idea “that visual art had to represent something from the external world” was challenged
  • Abstract pairing (aka “@@nonrepresentational@@”)
  • Avant-garde artists developed “@@new languages@@” for art (cubism, etc.)
• Assumption of typical sentence structure, syntax, and grammar in literature was challenged
  • ex. @@stream-of-consciousness@@ method of writing
• Logic of musical styles were questioned/rejected
• Artists joined in formal/informal groups

Literature and Art Before WW1

• New art languages were difficult, and hard to understand
• Avant-garde music was less involved with the public
• @@Schematic/mathematical devices@@ used in arts

Impressionists and Symbolists

• @@Impressionism@@ is the modernist movement in which light-capturing techniques are developed (“realists”) starting in the 1870s
  • Claude Monet
• @@Symbolism@@ is an unrealistic movement after impressionism in which words freely symbolized/signified
  • “Musical”
  • Symbolists were fascinated by Richard Wagner
• Claude @@Debussy@@ represents impressionism, w/ “fragmentary motives and little flashes of tone color,” but also symbolism, w/ suggestion

Expressionists and Fauves

• @@Expressionism@@ “sought to express the most extreme human feelings by divorcing art from everyday literalness”
  • German movement
  • Russian-born painter Vasily Kadinsky
  • Picasso (Les Demoiselles d’Avignon)
• Parallel group was @@Les fauves@@ in Paris (“the wild beasts”), who “experimented with distorted images bordering on the grotesque”; called it “primitive” art

Modernist Music Before WWI

The norm was @@logic@@ in tune, motive, harmony, tonality, tone color, and rhythm. Avant-garde modernist music @@strayed@@ from this logic.

Pre-WWII, emphasis on developments in melody, harmony, and tonality.

Experiment and Transformation: Melody

• @@Wagne@@r had a “confusing quality” in his singing lines
• @@Mahler@@ had “bittersweet distortions” applied to folklike tunes
• Arnold @@Schoenberg@@ (Viennese composer) had hard-to-comprehend complex melodies w/ exaggerated “intense rhythms” and “anguished intervals”
• @@Debussy@@ had “shadowy motives” (“suggestion of melody”)

New Horizons, New Scales

• Debussy was inspired by @@Indonesian gamelan@@ music that he heard at the 1889 Paris world’s fair
• @@Diatonic scale@@ was the foundation in Western music
• @@Pentatonic scale@@ is a 5 note scale playable on the black keys of a piano
  • From folk song and Asian music
  • Featured in Debussy’s Clouds
• @@Whole-tone scale@@ divides the octave into 6 equal parts
  • Whole step intervals
  • “Dreamy, ambiguous sound”
• @@Octatonic scale@@ “fits eight pitches into the octave by alternating whole and half steps”
  • Stravinsky
• @@Serialism@@ was the use of the “new language for music” invented by Schoenberg in the 1920s

“The Emancipation of Dissonance”

• @@Consonance@@ is when pitches sound stable and at rest in combination
• @@Dissonance@@ is when pitches sound tense in combination- sound like they need to resolve to consonance, but they now were not always resolved
• Some music was @@atonal@@, with no tonal (home) center
• Conservatives joked that melody, harmony, and tonality were the “holy trinity” of music

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