5. Social and cultural aspects

5. Social and cultural aspects.

The extensive commerce associated with musical life that had developed during the last quarter of the 19th century was held in the early 1900s as partially responsible for the prevalence of debased listening habits. Modernism was endorsed from the outset as an aesthetic strategy that fought against the domination and corruption of taste by business interests in the arts, particularly in concert management and music journalism and publishing. After 1918, Modernist composers sought refuge in new organizations, such as Schoenberg and Berg’s Verein für Musikalische Privataufführungen, Cowell and Varèse’s Pan American Association of Composers and the Copland and Sessions New York concerts. Modernism created a demand for new publishers and journals, leading to the establishment of the Arrow Press, Dreililien Verlag, New Music Series, Universal Edition, Editions Russes, New Music Quarterly, Modern Music and Musikblätter des Anbruchs. The selfconscious sense of an avant garde and the isolation from conventional commercial concert life (despite the notable advocacy of famous performers such as Koussevitzky, Klemperer and Stokowski) helped to widen a rift between popular and concert music that would plague Modernist composers throughout the century (see Avant garde). Modernism also alienated a large segment of the century’s professional performers. Intense hostility to most instrumentalists, singers and conductors came to characterize modernist composers, notably Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Sessions and Babbitt. In response, a select cadre of performers chose to link their careers explicitly with the Modernist avant garde, including the pianists Edward Steuermann, David Burge and Ursula Oppens, the violinists Louis Krasner, Rudolf Kolisch and Felix Galimir and the flautist Severino Gazzelloni, often working in small ensembles devoted to propagating Modernism.

In contrast to Modernism in painting (e.g. non-objectivism and abstraction) and architecture (functionalism from Adolf Loos to Le Corbusier), Modernism in music failed to alter fundamentally the tastes and practices of 20th-century mass culture. Film music and commercial advertising music did not come to reflect Modernist innovations in the way commercial design and illustration in visual media eventually appropriated new developments in 20th-century painting and culture. Only in the arenas of historical performing practice and music as academic discipline (in terms of theory and scholarship) did Modernism exert a wide influence and define standard practices.

In painting and literature, early 20th-century Modernism attacked realism and naturalism. Their counterparts in music were tonality, its link to narrative, and its formal consequences in, for example, sonata form and symphonic tone poetry, even in the manner practised with wide success in the 1880s and 90s by Strauss. Schoenberg’s Kammersymphonie op.9 (1906) explicitly eschewed repetition, large-scale forces, tonal stability and extensive duration. In the early controversies over Modernist innovations, tonality was construed as the functional equivalent of conventional but spurious claims to objective external reality and a natural system of representation. The pre-1914 challenges (by Schoenberg and Ives) to the uses of tonality and its attendant conventions rejected the means by which the extra-musical had been represented, signified and illustrated so effectively and successfully by Wagner and Italian verismo composers. Modernist music shared with contemporary radical innovations in the other arts an affinity to new epistemological theories which questioned the conventional subject–object construct. Theories of relativism, psychoanalysis, the limits of language and logical fallibility thrived alongside logical positivism as inspirations to Modernist experiments. Likewise, the work of Hermann Helmholtz and Ernst Mach on the physics of sound, the physiology of hearing and the psychology of sensation supported the arguments against viewing the logic and conventions of Western music, especially tonality, as objective and natural. So too did early 20th-century forays into anthropology that described and highlighted non-Western musical cultures not based on tonality.

Although narrative possibilities of music were not entirely rejected by the first generation of Modernists, the materials and strategies of musical representation underwent drastic change, away from attempts at direct allusion and correlation to an ‘inward’ relationship and ‘higher’ parallelism, as Schoenberg put it. In music, early Modernism thrived alongside Expressionism in poetry, drama and painting. Modernism also gained impetus from early 20th-century mystical enthusiasms and philosophies, such as theosophy, as well as from orientalist exoticism, primitivism and symbolism in poetry (Maurice Maeterlinck, Richard Dehmel, Stephane Mallarmé), dance (the choreography of Fokine, Massine and Nizhinsky) and the visual arts, including set design (the designs by Alfred Roller for Mahler’s operatic productions in Vienna from 1902 to 1907 and the pre-war work of Nicholas Roerich and Leon Bakst). In dramatic works from the early 1900s (e.g. Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle, 1911, and Schoenberg’s Die glückliche Hand, 1913) one can discern an aesthetic which reasserted absolutist non-representational musical aesthetics and revealed a new range in the use of musical materials in the context of operatic form. Schoenberg wrote in 1912: ‘There are relatively few people who are capable of understanding, purely in terms of music, what music has to say. The assumption that a piece of music must summon up images of one sort or another, and that if these are absent the piece of music has not been understood or is worthless, is as widespread as only the false and banal can be’. It is not surprising therefore that a formalist bias came to dominate Modernism after 1920.

Modernism was first publicly debated as a distinct historical phenomenon before World War I as a result of several prominent controversies tied to musical events between 1908 and 1913: the Viennese and Berlin premières of works by Schoenberg (particularly his Quartet no.2 and Pierrot lunaire), the Paris première of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps (at which Debussy was present) and the so-called ‘scandal’ concert of 1913 organized by Schoenberg in Vienna of music by himself, Berg, Webern, Zemlinsky and Mahler. These last two events were so contentious that police intervention was required. One leading Viennese critic, Ludwig Karpath, claimed that Schoenberg and his disciples were not only destroying music and violating true standards of beauty and art, they were insulting the audience and explicitly challenging its competence to judge music. Busoni published his Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst, a defence of progressive developments in the materials of music and methods of composition in 1907. Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre (1911) espoused the notions of the ‘emancipation of the dissonance’ and ‘extended tonality’. Within a year of the end of World War I, a debate over Modernism was well under way, particularly as a result of Pfitzner’s two blistering pamphlets, Futuristengefahr (1917) and Die neue ästhetik der musikalischen Impotenz: ein Verwesungssymptom? (1920). With Pfitzner, a permanent link between politics and aethetics was forged in the debate over Modernism that was to help define the direction of Modernism for most of the century. Faced with an initial resistance by the public and the critics, opponents decried the arrogance and arbitrary radicalism of the break with the past and tradition, while the innovators defended themselves by an appeal to history as it ought to be understood – the Wagnerian imperative to change and therefore, ironically, an anti-Wagnerian return to the principles of pre-Romantic classical composition – or by references to the unmet spiritual demands of the contemporary moment. The view of Brahms thus underwent revision; he became a model of purely musical innovation.