3. Aesthetic aspects

3. Aesthetic aspects.

Modernism in music was fuelled by more than aesthetic ambitions and the embrace of the uniquely new in music. A critique of contemporary cultural standards and the social uses of music as exemplified by the turn-of-the-century urban concert audience and public for music in the home was, from the start, a driving force behind early 20th-century compositional innovations. Reigning habits of listening were understood as too dependent on conservative expectations regarding music’s surface logic and its alluring, sensual and story-telling properties. Repetition, lush sonorities and a reliance on extra-musical narratives were chief targets in the turn-of-the-century discourse about music that differentiated, as Schoenberg argued, decoration and ornament from structure, and style from idea in the use of sounds alone. Contemporary taste appeared distorted by a dependence on false façades. The extensive and widespread bourgeois audience in Europe of concert-goers and amateurs before World War I was seen as addicted to art as comforting entertainment and affirmation, and unable and unwilling to confront the unique characteristics, transformative power and ethical character of true musical art. The popularity of third-rate operettas on the eve of World War I was just one symptom of this malaise. Music journalism was viewed as playing a nefarious role by claiming corrupt established compositional conventions as reflective of normative criteria of beauty in music. The social critique implicit in Modernist ideology created an uncomfortable and uneasy affinity between Modernism and conservative cultural criticism which, following Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869) and Max Nordau’s Entartung (1892, Eng. trans. 1895 as Degeneration), condemned mass society and the expansion of the audience for music and culture as responsible for the decline in standards, the corruption of taste and the encouragement of artistic mediocrity masquerading as the modern. Modernists and their defenders would never entirely escape the charge of intolerance, snobbery and élitism and a distaste for the democratization of culture made possible, ironically, by the technological advances of modernity, from printing to electronic reproduction and transmission.