• 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

• Wagner 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