2. Musical characteristics

2. Musical characteristics.

Despite the use of the term ‘modern’ in connection with Mahler (whose distortions of symphonic form, penchant for fragmentation and unconventional sonorities and use of instruments, including cowbells and hammers, were cited by later Modernists and their defenders such as Webern and Paul Bekker), Debussy (on account of his use of harmony and interest in non-Western music), Skryabin (also for harmonic originality) and Strauss (whose Salome and Elektra were considered thoroughly avant garde), these four figures were ultimately understood as precursors of 20th-century Modernism. By 1912 Strauss was viewed as having turned away from Modernism; Mahler died in 1911, Skryabin in 1915 and Debussy in 1918. Busoni, Schoenberg, Schreker and Stravinsky were recognized before 1914 as the first proponents of 20th-century Modernism. The selfconscious search in the years immediately before 1914 by composers and performers for a language of music adequate to and reflective of the contemporary moment revealed a conception of modernity dominated by the progress of science, technology and industry, and by positivism, mechanization, urbanization, mass culture and nationalism. A heightened sensitivity to the isolation and alienation of the individual and a concomitant intensity of personal emotions accompanied the sense of newness and discontinuity that pervaded the first years of the century.

The aesthetic reaction to modernity reflected not only enthusiasm but ambivalence and anxiety. Nietzsche’s critique of modernity was well known. Nevertheless, the shared assumption surrounding the subsequent debates over Modernism was that the present was far more radical in its contrasts with the immediate past than previous periods had been. Therefore the historical tastes and aesthetic styles characteristic of much mid- and late-19th-century painting, architecture and music were rejected. Overt departures from immediate historical precedents became hallmarks of early Modernism. Furthermore, given a pervasive sense of dread about societal and cultural consequences of modernity, the subjective experience of the artist, at the moment, became increasingly glorified. In this regard, early Modernism was indebted to turn-of-the-century advances in painting, particularly Impressionism and Expressionism. Varèse captured the subjective and political aspects of the Modernist credo accurately when he wrote, in 1917, ‘I dream of instruments obedient to my thought and which, with their contribution of a whole new world of unsuspected sounds, will lend themselves to the exigencies of my inner rhythm’, and in 1936, ‘the very newness of the mechanism of life is forcing our activities and our forms of human association to break with the traditions and methods of the past in the effort to adapt themselves to circumstances’.

The basic assumptions underlying the compositional traditions of the 19th century underwent scrutiny, particularly the concept and practice of tonality, the reliance on recognizable rhythmic regularities, the dependence on traditional instruments and sonic effects and the use of extended compositional forms, as in the case of Bruckner. Normative expectations regarding beauty in sound and timbre and meaning in musical expression were confronted, especially in matters of orchestration, the use of instruments and the voice vis-à-vis the techniques of post-Wagnerian composition. The link between music and narration particularly came under scrutiny. Modernity demanded the shattering of expectations, conventions, categories, boundaries and limits as well as empirical experimentation (following the example of science) and the confident exploration of the new. This would inspire the continuing search during the century for new systems of pitch organization as alternatives to tonality, and for new instruments, often the result of technological advances, from the theremin (1920) and the ondes martenot (1928) to the synthesizer and the computer. As the Italian futurist Luigi Russolo wrote in 1913, ‘We must break out of this narrow circle of pure musical sounds, and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds’. The employment of Sprechstimme by Schoenberg in Pierrot lunaire (1912) is one notable early example; text and sound no longer ran together along parallel descriptive logics.