Modernism (music)
| Periods and eras of Western classical music |
|
|---|---|
| Early | |
| Medieval | c. 500–1400 |
| Renaissance | c. 1400–1600 |
| Common practice | |
| Baroque | c. 1600–1750 |
| Classical | c. 1730–1820 |
| Romantic | c. 1780–1910 |
| Impressionist | c. 1875–1925 |
| Modern and contemporary | |
|
c. 1890–1975 |
| 20th century | (1900–2000) |
| c. 1975–present | |
| 21st century | (2000–present) |
In music, modernism is a philosophical and aesthetic stance underlying the period of change and development in musical language that occurred around the turn of the 20th century, a period of diverse reactions in challenging and reinterpreting older categories of music, innovations that lead to new ways of organizing and approaching harmonic, melodic, sonic, and rhythmic aspects of music, and changes in aesthetic worldviews in close relation to the larger identifiable period of modernism in the arts of the time. The operative word most associated with it is "innovation" (Metzer 2009, 3). Its leading feature is a "linguistic plurality", which is to say that no one music genre ever assumed a dominant position (Morgan 1984, 443).
Inherent within musical modernism is the conviction that music is not a static phenomenon defined by timeless truths and classical principles, but rather something which is intrinsically historical and developmental. While belief in musical progress or in the principle of innovation is not new or unique to modernism, such values are particularly important within modernist aesthetic stances.
Examples include the celebration of Arnold Schoenberg's rejection of tonality in chromatic post-tonal and twelve-tone works and Igor Stravinsky's move away from metrical rhythm (Campbell 2010, 37).
Musicologist Carl Dahlhaus describes modernism as:
an obvious point of historical ... The "breakthrough" of Mahler, Strauss, and Debussy implies a profound historical transformation ... 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 Hermann Bahr's term "modernism" and speak of a stylistically open-ended "modernist music" extending (with some latitude) from 1890 to the beginnings of our own twentieth-century modern music in 1910. (Dahlhaus 1989, 334)
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