| History of European art music | |
| Early | |
|---|---|
| Medieval | (500 – 1400) |
| Renaissance | (1400 – 1600) |
| Common practice | |
| Baroque | (1600 – 1760) |
| Classical | (1730 – 1820) |
| Romantic | (1815 – 1910) |
| Modern and contemporary | |
| 20th century classical | (1900 – 2000) |
| Contemporary classical | (1975 – present) |
Modernism in music is characterized by a desire for or belief in progress and science, surrealism, anti-romanticism, political advocacy, general intellectualism, and/or a breaking with the past or common practice — Ezra Pound's modernist slogan, "Make it new," as applied to music. Classical music is a broad term that usually refers to mainstream music produced in or rooted in the traditions of Western liturgical and Secular music Early music is commonly defined as European classical music from the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Baroque. The term medieval music encompasses European music written during the Middle Ages. Renaissance music is European music written during the Renaissance, approximately 1400 - 1600 The common practice period, in the history of European Art music (broadly called Classical music) spanning the Baroque, Classical, and Baroque music describes an era and a set of styles of European classical music which were in widespread use between approximately 1600 and 1750. The dates of the Classical period in Western music are generally accepted as 1750 to 1810 Romantic Music is a Musicological term referring to a particular period theory compositional practice and canon in European music history from about 1815 to 1910 At the turn of the 20th century classical music was characteristically late Romantic in style while at the same time the Impressionist movement spearheaded by Claude Debussy Contemporary classical music can be understood as belonging to a period that started in the mid-1970s with the retreat of modernism. Science (from the Latin scientia, meaning " Knowledge " or "knowing" is the effort to discover, and increase human understanding Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early-1920s and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members Politics Politics is the process by which groups of people make decisions Advocacy Advocacy is the pursuit of influencing outcomes –including public-policy and resource allocation decisions within political economic and social systems Intellectualism is any of a number of views regarding the use or development of the Intellect or the practice of being an Intellectual. The common practice period, in the history of European Art music (broadly called Classical music) spanning the Baroque, Classical, and Ezra Weston Loomis Pound ( Hailey, Idaho Territory, United States October 30 1885 – Venice, Italy November 1 1972 was an American Expatriate Modernism describes an array of Cultural movements rooted in the changes in Western society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Modern music is often thought to begin with, or just after, Debussy's impressionist works, rising to rhetorical, if not commercial, dominance after World War Two, and then being gradually displaced by postmodern music. World War II, or the Second World War, (often abbreviated WWII) was a global military conflict which involved a majority of the world's nations, including Postmodern music is music which follows the postmodern ideology
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Defining musical modernism
Musicologist Carl Dahlhaus restricted his definition of musical modernism to progressive music in the period 1890-1910:
The year 1890. Carl Dahlhaus ( June 10 1928 – March 13, 1989) a Musicologist from Berlin, has been one of the major contributors to the . . lends itself as an obvious point of historical discontinuity. . . . The "breakthrough" of Mahler, Strauss, and Debussy implies a profound historical transformation. Richard Georg Strauss (11 June 1864 &ndash 8 September 1949 was a German Composer of the late Romantic era and early modern era particularly noted Achille-Claude Debussy (aʃil klod dəbysi (August 22 1862 &ndash March 25 1918 was a French Composer. . . . If we were to search for a name to convey the breakaway mood of the 1890s (a mood symbolized musically by the opening bars of Strauss's Don Juan) but without imposing a fictitious unity of style on the age, we could do worse than revert to [the] term "modernism" extending (with some latitude) from the 1890 to the beginnings of our own twentieth-century modern music in 1910. Don Juan (Spanish or Don Giovanni (Italian is a legendary fictional Libertine whose story has been told many times by many authors . . . The label "late romanticism". Romantic Music is a Musicological term referring to a particular period theory compositional practice and canon in European music history from about 1815 to 1910 . . is a terminological blunder of the first order and ought to be abandoned forthwith. It is absurd to yoke Strauss, Mahler, and the young Schoenberg, composers who represent modernism in the minds of their turn-of-the-century contemporaries, with the self-proclaimed anti-modernist Pfitzner, calling them all "late romantics" in order to supply a veneer of internal unity to an age fraught with stylistic contradictions and conflicts. WikipediaWikiProject Composers#Lead section --> Hans Erich Pfitzner ( May 5, 1869 &ndash May 22, Romanticism is a complex artistic literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Western Europe, and gained strength during the (Dahlhaus 1989, 334)
Besides eliminating the progress meta-narrative of the above definition, this definition is also capable of application to more the music, artists, and movements considered modernist: Expressionism & New Objectivity, Hyperrealism & Abstractionism, Neoclassicism & Neobarbarism, Futurism & the mythic Method. In Critical theory, and particularly Postmodernism, a metanarrative (from Meta - Narrative, sometimes also known as a master- or Expressionism is the tendency of an artist to distort reality for an Emotional effect it is a subjective art form The New Objectivity, or Neue Sachlichkeit (new dispassion was an art movement that arose in Germany in the early 1920s as an outgrowth of and in opposition to In Semiotics and Postmodern philosophy, the term hyperreality characterizes the inability of Consciousness to distinguish Reality from Fantasy --> Abstraction is the process or result of generalization by reducing the information Neoclassicism (sometimes rendered as Neo-Classicism or Neo-classicism) is the name given to quite distinct movements in the decorative and Futurism was an Art movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century The word mythology (from the Greek grc μυθολογία mythología, meaning "a story-telling a legendary lore"
Leon Botstein, on the other hand, asserts that musical modernism is characterized by "a conception of modernity dominated by the progress of science, technology and industry, and by positivism, mechanization, urbanization, mass culture and nationalism", an aesthetic reaction to which "reflected not only enthusiasm but ambivalence and anxiety" (Botstein 2007).
Other writers regard the period of musical modernism as extending only to about 1930, and apply the term "postmodernism" to the period after that year (Karolyi 1994, 135; Meyer 1994, 331–32).
Examples of modernism in music
- Science and sci-fi
In the 1910s, futurists such as Luigi Russolo looked to a future of music liberated to the point of being able to use any sound, even "noises" such as factory and mechanical sounds (Russolo, "The Art of Noises"), while Edgard Varèse created his Poème électronique specifically for the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair with 400 speakers, designed by Le Corbusier with the assistance of Iannis Xenakis (EMF Institute article "Poème électronique"). Futurists, or futurologists, are those who speculate about the future Luigi Russolo ( April 30, 1885 - February 4, 1947) was an Italian Futurist painter and Composer, and the author of Sound' is Vibration transmitted through a Solid, Liquid, or Gas; particularly sound means those vibrations composed of Frequencies is a one volume manga created by Tsutomu Nihei as a prequel to his ten-volume work Blame!. WikipediaWikiProject Composers#Lead section --> Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varèse, whose name was also spelled Edgar Varèse Poème électronique (English Translation "Electronic Poem" is a piece of Electronic music by Composer Edgard Varèse. Expo 58, also known as the Brussels World’s Fair, Brusselse Wereldtentoonstelling or Exposition Universelle et Internationale de Bruxelles, was held from Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, who chose to be known as Le Corbusier ( October 6, 1887 – August 27, 1965) was a Swiss Iannis Xenakis (Ιάννης Ξενάκης (May 29 1922 - February 4 2001 was a Greek modernist composer musical theoretician and architect
- Extended techniques and sounds
John Cage and Lou Harrison wrote works in the late 1940s for percussion orchestra. WikipediaWikiProject Composers#Lead section --> John Milton Cage Jr Lou Silver Harrison ( May 14, 1917 &ndash February 2, 2003) was an American Harrison later wrote for and built gamelans, while Cage popularized extended techniques on the piano in his prepared piano pieces, starting in 1938 (Stephen Drury, "In a Landscape") Starting in the early 1920s, Harry Partch built his own ensemble of instruments, mostly percussion and string instruments, to allow the performance of his theatrical ("corporeal") justly tuned microtonal music (Partch biography page at harrypartch.com). A gamelan is a musical ensemble of Indonesia typically featuring a variety of instruments such as metallophones xylophones drums and gongs bamboo flutes bowed and Extended techniques are performance techniques used in Music to describe unconventional unorthodox or "improper" techniques of Singing, or of A prepared piano is a Piano which has had its sound altered by placing objects (preparations between or on the strings or on the hammers or dampers Harry Partch ( June 24, 1901 &ndash September 3, 1974) was an American Composer and instrument creator In music just intonation is any Musical tuning in which the frequencies of Notes are related by Ratios of Whole numbers Any interval Microtonal music is Music using microtones — intervals of less than an equally spaced Semitone.
- Speech and singing
Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate (1921–32) develops from words like "fmsbwtözäu", taken from the "poster-poems" of Raoul Hausmann. Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters ( 20 June 1887 - 8 January 1948) was a German painter who was born in Raoul Hausmann (July 12 1886 &ndash February 1 1971 was an Austrian artist and writer
History of modernism in music
Late nineteenth-century origins
As with many other arts, the consciousness of modernity appeared before music which is now labelled "modernist".
Musical modernism's reception and controversy
Stanley Cavell describes the "burden of modernism" as caused by a situation wherein the "procedures and problems it now seems necessary to composers to employ and confront to make a work of art at all themselves insure that their work will not be comprehensible to an audience" (Cavell 1976, 187).
Sources
- Albright, Daniel. 2000. Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226012530 (cloth) ISBN 0226012549 (pbk)
- Albright, Daniel. 2004. Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-01267-0.
- Ashby, Arved. 2004. "Modernism Goes to the Movies". In The Pleasure of Modernist Music, edited by Arved Ashby, 345-86. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. ISBN 1-58046-143-3.
- Botstein, Leon. "Modernism". Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy. <http://www.grovemusic.com> (subscription access)
- Cavell, Stanley. 1976. "Music Discomposed", in his Must We Mean What We Say?. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521290481 (cloth), ISBN 0521211166 (pbk). Updated edition, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN 0521821886 (cloth), ISBN 0521529190 (pbk). Cited in The Pleasure of Modernist Music, edited by, Arved Ashby, 146 n13. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. ISBN 1-58046-143-3.
- Dahlhaus, Carl. 1989. Nineteenth-Century Music. Translated by J. Bradford Robinson. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- Karolyi, Otto. 1994. Modern British Music: The Second British Musical Renaissance—From Elgar to P. Maxwell Davies. Rutherford, Madison, Teaneck: Farleigh Dickinson University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses. ISBN 0-8386-3532-6
- Meyer, Leonard B. 1994. Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Patterns and Predictions in Twentieth-Century Culture, second edition. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-52143-5
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