8. World War II and after

8. World War II and after.

In part as a result of the political significance and ethical overtones of Modernism, its moment of relative dominance among composers occurred in the late 1940s, the 50s and the 60s, the decades most influenced by the shock of the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Enthusiasm for post-Webern serialism and experimentalism thrived. In this context T.W. Adorno (who studied with Berg and Steuermann) emerged as the most influential postwar theoretical advocate of Modernism. Adorno focussed on Schoenberg and his school, which he regarded as the only true and historically valid progressive school of composition. Unlike Schoenberg himself, he dismissed Stravinsky and Bartók (who never entirely abandoned tonality as a framework) as false responses to modernity. If music was to follow its true historical logic and fulfil its political and ethical function, it had to resist the regressive habits of listening and the fetishistic use of music characteristic of advanced capitalism and institutionalized by fascism (e.g. Tin Pan Alley, jazz, Hollywood, Broadway and classical music concerts and radio broadcasts that repeated a select number of masterpieces from the standard repertory). The conflict between the audience and the rejection of inherited conventions of musical expression became virtues and signs of authenticity. Only by resisting an aesthetic that exploited music’s power to affirm active collaboration with evil and to encourage passive submission to injustice, exploitation and oppression could 20th-century music realize the inherent liberating power of art. Adorno claimed that Schoenberg’s creation of serial technique and Webern’s extension of it in the use of silence, duration and discontinuities made Schoenberg, as he himself asserted, the true prophet of the 20th century. Ultimately, through an encounter with Modernist 20th-century music, the contemporary public could once again learn to appreciate the essence of Beethoven and the canonic repertory so highly prized but abused by reactionaries as a foil against innovation. In the 1950s Modernists such as Milton Babbitt argued that a mass public was irrelevant and construed the isolation of Modernism from the general public and its new status as music for an élite as a virtue.

After 1945 the implications of Webern’s music – 12-note composition, short forms, transparent textures, delicate sonorities, fragmentation, experiments with time and the use of silence as an element of punctuation – defined not only the legacy of Viennese Modernism but became emblematic of Modernism per se. Even Stravinsky and Copland were motivated in the 1950s and 60s to employ serial techniques in their music. The French-Russian trajectory had evolved into the neo-classicism exemplified by the teaching of Nadia Boulanger. Messiaen helped sustain a distinct postwar French Modernist influence. The German Expressionist tradition continued with Henze and Hartmann but was itself influenced by the Schoenberg school. The overwhelming majority of postwar German, Italian and French Modernists, including Dallapiccola, Stockhausen, Boulez, Maderna, Pousseur, Nono and Berio and the participants in the most influential Modernist festivals of the late 1940s, 50s and 60s (the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik at Darmstadt and Musiktage für zeitgenössische Tonkunst in Donaueschingen), followed the path charted by Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School. In postwar America the European émigrés, including Schoenberg, Hindemith and Krenek, exerted a powerful influence that often intersected with indigenous Modernism. Experimentalism, conceptualism and radical minimalism flourished (e.g. the music of Lou Harrison, Harry Partch and Steve Reich). Cowell and Cage became influential as composers and theoreticians. Modernism encompassed electronic music, adaptations of non-Western musics (e.g. in the music of Colin McPhee), new forms of notation and chance music. The work of Sessions, Ligeti and Elliott Carter reflects a brilliant synthesis of indigenous impulses and also European Modernist techniques. The postwar music of Stockhausen and Xenakis mirrors the integration of technology and modern scientific theory with earlier Modernist strategies. In America, Perspectives of New Music became the leading postwar academic journal of advocacy for Modernism.