I’ll introduce this section with a flyover of music from roughly 1900, more or less the beginning of modernism, to roughly the present, more or less the postmodern and/or post-postmodern period. It’s a gigantic and daunting territory. The hope is to give some context to the varicolored work on display during the most democratic, most innovative, most hopeful, also most bloody, tragic, and perilous period in human history.
Musical modernism began in Europe around the turn of the twentieth century, rising from the lingering death of romanticism, which succumbed to excesses of ambition and ego and the decay of old forms and assumptions. By that point traditional systems of tonal scales and harmony had been so bent out of shape that they needed either to be rethought or discarded entirely. Culturally, the term for this period is fin de siècle—end of the century, end of an era. But it was more than a simple ending; it was a falling apart. Much of that disintegration was social: the first two decades of the twentieth century saw the rise of nationalism and anti-Semitism in Germany that produced the Nazis; in Russia came the Russian Revolution. Both movements would move the world inexorably toward war and to mass murder on an unprecedented scale.
So, modernism in all the arts came in part from a time of cultural malaise, decadence, and despair in Europe—in creative terms, though, a highly productive malaise. But there was a good deal more at play. A useful date for the arrival of modernism in music was the appearance of Debussy’s L’après-midi d’un faune in 1894 (while Brahms was still alive, by the way). As we’ll see, Debussy was arguably the most revolutionary composer of all time. Part of his inspiration came from an early encounter with a Javanese gamelan ensemble. This exotic music galvanized Debussy, in the same way that the young Picasso was galvanized by the stylized distortions of African masks, which led him to conceive cubism.
Beyond the broadening of horizons provided by quicker travel and communication, there was a general restlessness among artists. They strove to find new languages, new freedoms and new disciplines, new visions of the human. In music, after Debussy there was a rage for fresh instrumental colors and harmonies—which was partly stimulated by the increasing variety and sophistication of modern orchestration. In the past originality had been prized but innovation less so, at least by audiences. Now among modernist artists innovation became the coin of the realm. Thus the old modernist manifesto: “Make it good or make it bad, but make it new.”
Modernism, for all its revolutionary ambitions, was really a continuation, expansion, and intensification of trends that had been growing in the arts through the nineteenth century. Part of that was a Wagnerian vision of the artist as a visionary genius, a demigod, and so on. In many ways, the romantic cult of genius went on to fuel modernism. Added to that was a growing divide between artists and audiences, which also began in the nineteenth century. Artists cared less and less what audiences thought of them. For modernist composers this meant that, while the pay had never been lavish or predictable, there was steadily less chance to make a living from their art. Once they embraced this fact composers felt even less beholden to their listeners—art would be for art’s sake only. By the twentieth century, most composers made their living teaching or in nonmusical jobs. Many works of the twentieth century, the good and bad alike, depended on courageous performers who sometimes mounted pieces over the protests of the audience.
Two historic premieres of 1912–1913 represent the full emergence of modernism, in the persons of two composers who seemed to embody the movement in virtually opposite ways. The year 1912 saw the premiere of Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, a setting of unsettling fin-de-siècle poems in a style that amplified their strangeness. Pierrot is a small-scale chamber piece, but its effect in history was that of a bombshell. The other bombshell was even grander: Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps, a work of dazzling, highly sophisticated primitivism.
For the rest of the century those two composers seemed to embody the two sides of musical modernism: Schoenberg the more austere, theoretical, and audience-defying, Stravinsky the more voluptuous and eventually more audience-pleasing. In the early years of modernism audience riots became familiar in premieres of new pieces. The biggest riots of all were at the notorious 1913 premiere of Sacre, and at a concert that same year in Vienna with premieres of Schoenberg and Berg. In both concerts there were screams and fistfights in the audience; in Vienna the police had to be called and the orchestra played ashen with fear. (Why do riots no longer happen in the concert hall? Most likely it was because people in 1912 cared more about music than audiences do now. In those days, if audiences hated your piece, they wanted to do you harm.)
Modernism as it unfolded in the rest of the century is harder to summarize. In their explorations artists were going in every direction at once: primitivism and futurism and postimpressionism, serialists and minimalists and neoclassicists, extremes of complexity and of simplicity. Alongside these movements were late-romantic holdouts, such as Rachmaninoff; Americanists, such as Aaron Copland; and more or less unclassifiables, such as Charles Ives and Samuel Barber. If this sounds something like chaos, so it was and so it remains. But it’s an often fruitful chaos.
War played its part in all of it. The aftershocks of cultural movements, wars, and other historic events reverberate through the generations, and that process affects music as much as any other human endeavor. A postwar period is a frame of mind, something on the order of culture-wide posttraumatic stress. What often follows war is a retreat, a need to find new rhymes and reasons because the old ones proved catastrophic. The First World War had been followed by the Jazz Age, the economic crash, and the grueling Depression of the 1930s. In the aftershock of World War I, composers including Schoenberg and Stravinsky turned in their own way to a more formal, more rationalized, less freely intuitive direction: Schoenberg to the twelve-tone method, Stravinsky to neoclassicism.
After World War II the response of music and the other arts to the postwar zeitgeist was varied and contradictory. As always, some of the leading ideas came from Europe, especially since some of the most influential European artists were now working in the United States. Before and during World War II, many leading figures in music and the other arts had emigrated there. Schoenberg and Stravinsky each had legions of American disciples.
One of the wellsprings of modernism was impressionism. The movement began in France, where starting in the 1860s painters began hauling their canvases outdoors and trying to capture light and rippling water. The studio-bound gloom of nineteenth-century academic painting was replaced by pastel canvases glowing with sunlight that dissolved hard edges and shapes. The style of Claude Monet, Jean Renoir, and others came to be called impressionist because it proposed to capture an impression rooted in an instant of perception.
When Claude Debussy burst onto the scene with music based as much on tone color and rhythm as on form or melody, it was soon dubbed impressionist. Like the painters, Debussy wanted to capture the sea, clouds, festivals in sensuous washes of color. Also like them, Debussy was more interested in atmosphere than in traditional form and logic. As had the painters, he used the discipline he had learned in the academy to throw out much of what the academy taught him. When the younger Maurice Ravel came along with his pastel harmonies and luscious instrumental textures, critics joined him to Debussy as a co-impressionist. (Really Ravel, who hung on to the old formal patterns, was as much a neoclassicist as anything.) In art and music impressionism was a revolution quickly and widely embraced. It influenced composers as diverse as Charles Ives, George Gershwin, and Béla Bartók. At the same time impressionist harmony became an indispensable element of the great period of twentieth-century American popular song from the 1920s to the 1950s.
Expressionism was a gnarlier founding element of modernism. While impressionism was fundamentally French, expressionism was fundamentally Austro-German. In those countries political reaction, militarism, and anti-Semitism were more belligerent than in France. Artists embraced Freud’s new science of psychoanalysis, which created an image of the human mind as a fragile crust of rationality over an unconscious tide of urges, violence, sexuality, and pain. As much as anything, that joining of inner and outer turbulence created this distinctly Germanic creative revolution. In painting, expressionism took shape as an art whose tortured forms and sometimes clotted colors rose from a willful primitivism. Much of the style took off from Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch, and James Ensor, painters of nightmare, terror, and ecstasy. The later echt-expressionist painters included Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, and Egon Schiele with his disconcerting self-portraits. The first expressionist film was the legendary Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, in which the nightmare distortions of the sets echo the mind of a violently insane man.
There had always been a certain objectivity about impressionism. It was concerned with feeling, but more with trying to catch the tangibility of nature: Monet’s water lilies, Debussy’s sea wind. For the expressionists, it was about the interior regions of the mind, the irrational, madness and dream. Whereas the impressionists reveled in the perfumed, vaporous, and sensuous, expressionists reached for the convulsive, raw, and dissonant. Beauty and lyricism were not forbidden, but they had to be fraught, shapes and colors filtered through the conscious and unconscious mind of the artist.
The prophetic writer and social critic Karl Kraus called fin-de-siècle Vienna “an isolation cell in which one was allowed to scream,” and beyond that, “the research laboratory for world destruction.” To cite one example, virulently anti-Semitic Vienna provided historic inspiration for an Austrian corporal and would-be painter named Adolf Hitler. It’s no surprise then that Vienna was the wellspring of musical expressionism, seen above all in the music of Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils Anton Webern and Alban Berg.
Schoenberg and his disciples turned away from traditional tonality and toward steady dissonance and what came to be called atonality, their melodies rejecting the smooth lines of the past in favor of lines jagged and sometimes shrieking. Much of the early period of their art dealt with extremes of anguish and tragedy. Defining works include Schoenberg’s Erwartung, in which a crazed woman stumbles over the body of her lover, whom she may have murdered. Webern’s stunning Six Pieces for Orchestra, written in a tumult of feelings after the death of his mother, is a landscape of pain. Berg in his opera Wozzeck created with heartbreaking honesty and compassion the story of a soldier doomed by inner and outer forces beyond his control.
After the convulsion of World War I both impressionism and expressionism receded, the first moving toward irrelevance and cliché, the second toward exhaustion. Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg turned to the new twelve-tone method of composition, which searched for a new order and a more spiritual vision. But the reverberations of both impressionism and expressionism are still with us, for well and for ill. Both were powerful, fertile, and fertilizing modes of thought and expression that gave new languages to art.
After World War I, a formidable train of thought flowed outward from Europe in Schoenberg’s twelve-tone, eventually dubbed serial, method, in which a whole work is based on a single arrangement of the twelve notes of the chromatic scale. In the work of Schoenberg and his disciples Anton Webern and Alban Berg, the twelve-tone method was a theoretical rationalization of their earlier free-atonal music.
What we call tonal music has been around more or less since the beginning of music, each culture inflecting it in its own way. Tonal music is based on scales. What is a scale? If you know The Sound of Music, sing the end of its song about the scale, on the traditional syllables: do–re–mi–fa–so–la–ti–do. There you have a seven-note major scale, the most common scale in Western music for the last 500 years or so. A minor scale lowers the mi, la, and sometimes the ti. In the past five hundred years nearly all Western music has been based on major and minor scales in the various keys. We tend to think of major keys as “brighter” and “happier” than minor ones, and minor ones more given to sadness and poignancy. Those scales tend to work that way expressively, except when they don’t: there are minorish majors and majorish minors.
When you sang the scale, did you notice that the first and last notes, do to do, sounded like the main notes in the scale? In all cultures, a given scale has a keynote, a tone that is considered its home base. That tone is why we call the music tonal: it is based on that idea of a home tone in each key, with its associated scales. That home tone is called the tonic, or tonal center. Every key is named for its tonal center: C major, D minor, A-flat major, and so on. The other notes of the scale function in a hierarchy of relationships to the tonic. The fifth degree of the scale, so, is the second in command and is called the dominant. In effect, you can say that in a given scale only the tonic is the true home; the other notes in the major or minor scale yearn for it, each in its own way.
On each note of the scale you can build a chord. The most common kind of chord in tonal music is a three-note one called a triad. The lowest note in a triad is its root. You make a triad by going up two notes from the root, then two again. Each triad in a key is named for the scale degree that is its root. The tonic triad in the key of C major, for example, is spelled C–E–G, the dominant triad G–B–D.
Like scales, triads come in various flavors, mainly major and minor. D–F-sharp–A is a D major triad; D–F–A is a D minor triad. A chord is defined as any three or more notes played together. There are many kinds of chords besides a major or minor triad, some of them traditional and some of them first explored in the twentieth century. Here’s a traditional four-note chord: if you take a triad and add a note a third from the top note, say, G–B–D–F, you’ve created a seventh chord, because the F is the interval of a seventh from the G.
In Western classical tonality a seventh chord is defined as a dissonance. In tonal music dissonance means two things. First, it is an acoustically busier, more complicated sound than a consonance, so is considered less restful. Second, a dissonance is expected eventually to resolve into something more restful or acoustically more smooth. That smoother sound is called a consonance. So, in traditional tonal music, dissonance is expected to resolve to consonance; that is, tension to resolution.
Some people think of dissonance in music as something ugly and say it should be banished. That’s nuts. Dissonance is absolutely necessary, in music as in life. All Western music is an ebb and flow of dissonance and consonance, moving away from rest and back to it, putting off cadences, deflecting expected resolutions, and generally playing subtle and expressive games with the creation and resolution of tension. In his late music Beethoven put off cadences achingly long, sometimes to create tension, sometimes a sense of suspension and reverie. The skilled manipulation of tension and release, consonance and dissonance, is what separates a master from a hack.
Whereas Mozart and Haydn in the classical period largely wanted to keep their tonality and harmony and form fairly clear, Beethoven got increasingly interested in more distant key relationships, more prolonged harmonic periods, less overt forms. By the romantic century composers were exploring deliberate harmonic ambiguity, rising levels of dissonance, long delays of resolution. The first song in Robert Schumann’s cycle Dichterliebe ends exquisitely on an unresolved seventh chord.
Over the nineteenth century composers poked and prodded at the diatonic tonal system, added more dissonance to the mix, more complex and nimble key changes, explorations of sustained tonal ambiguity that left the sense of key suspended. By the early years of the twentieth century some composers, mainly Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils Webern and Berg, came to the conclusion that the tonal system was exhausted. For reasons as much expressive as technical, they began writing music with free harmony, meaning no triads, no hierarchy of consonance and dissonance, little or no sense of a tonal center. Keys, in other words, were banished. Tonality was dead. Any harmony was allowed. Now we’ve arrived at atonality, meaning music without tonal centers. (Not that all music with free harmony is atonal—some composers, including Bartók, wrote quite freely but retained a sense of a central note.)
The best way to compare tonal and atonal music is by listening to some examples. First listen to the first movement of Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik (A Little Night Music). Here harmony and key are straightforward. Now listen to the opening of Brahms’s String Quintet in F Major, Op. 88. Both pieces are tonal, but Brahms is interested in more colorful, out-of-the-way modulations (changes of key) and harmonies than Mozart. Next, try Wagner’s Prelude to Tristan und Isolde. He’s using chords that existed in tonal music, but mainly the more dissonant ones, and he’s putting them together so freely that the music has little to no sense of a tonal center. Now listen to one of the pioneering modernist atonal pieces, the first of Schoenberg’s Drei Klavierstücke, Op. 11 (preferably Glenn Gould’s recording). What you hear is dreamlike music, wandering, unpredictable, but with an intense personality of its own. The harmonies are steadily dissonant by traditional standards, though there is still some ebb and flow of relative consonance and dissonance. So, in an atonal piece there is not a scale in sight except for one: the chromatic scale, which includes all the notes within an octave—if you count them on the piano, they add up to twelve.
Part of what marks tonal music is its large-scale predictability. You know that dissonance will resolve to consonance, and however far the music has ranged among the keys, it will usually return to the tonic key at the end. That’s why pieces are labeled by their tonic key, as in Symphony in D Major: no matter how far it ranges in keys, it will return to the D tonic at the end. (Sometimes pieces begin in a minor key and end in a major, but the tonic will be the same: say, F minor to F major.) In atonal music, however, there is no tonal resolution and you can’t predict much of anything. You have to live in the moment. For some, that’s a limitation; for others, a freedom. I find it simply a characteristic, and enjoy it for what it is. (Atonal music does not have to be constantly dissonant, though it often is.) Meanwhile atonality opened up, for the first time, the fullest possible palette of harmony.
One further point needs to be made about atonal music. In my musical education I was taught that atonality and tonality were purely a technical matter, products of ongoing innovation in history and methods that can be learned. They are those things, but music is equally an expressive matter. To get at the emotional territories they were after, some of them dark and scary territories, composers needed to write music like this. In my student years I found many American composers writing in ways that mimicked early twentieth-century Austro-German expressionism in technique and style, which I regarded as puzzling. Those composers ignored the fact that the style was connected to a place, a culture, a zeitgeist, and stemmed from particular artistic personalities writing out of particular needs and concerns and ecstasies and madnesses. Whatever a composer’s technique, one needs to write out of who one is and when and where one came from.
We’re getting to twelve tone now. At first, Schoenberg and his followers to a degree experimented freely in terms of harmony and such; each piece had its particular motifs and material, but there was no overall procedure. This phase, the first years of all their mature work, is called free atonality. No tonal center, no overriding method, dissonance and consonance considered equal—that is, dissonance liberated from the need to resolve. A number of tremendous pieces were written in free atonality: Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, Webern’s Five Pieces for String Quartet, Berg’s opera Wozzeck.
But after World War I Schoenberg wanted a more disciplined direction—in other words, a method. I think there were a number of reasons for it, some emotional, some historical, some technical. After the irrational chaos and disruption of war there is often a yen for things more calm, more reasonable, more under control. (And/or more fun—consider the Jazz Age of the 1920s.)
After the war, Stravinsky turned to his more focused, backward-looking neoclassic style. Schoenberg came up with a new way of writing, which he called the twelve-tone method. Like traditional tonal music it had its rules and regulations. As will be examined in the Schoenberg essay, a twelve-tone piece is based throughout on what amounts to a single chromatic melody: a particular arrangement of the twelve notes of the chromatic scale called a row, which can then be handled in a great variety of ways. To a large extent the idea of a row came from the nineteenth century’s increasing focus on thematic relationships, such as Liszt’s basing a whole piece on a single small theme or motif.
Think of twelve tone as Schoenberg’s version of Stravinskian neoclassicism—after all that winging it, a return to law and order. (Stravinsky had winged it in Le sacre du printemps, with surpassing brilliance.) After World War II there was a turn to the kind of intensified concentration on rows pioneered by Webern; this postwar, post-Webern music came to be called serial because it is founded on a series—a row, more relentlessly applied than ever. Among the apostles of “total serialism” were Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, but neither of them necessarily conformed to its rules in the long run.
If the neoclassic faction in some degree resonated with the postwar yearning for peace and normality, the intellectual rigor of serialism arose in part from a drive for rationality after the catastrophic irrationalities of World War II. In Europe and soon in America, composers, including Boulez, took up post-Webern serialism as a holy cause, proclaiming its historical necessity as a new common practice. Meanwhile Boulez’s colleague Stockhausen, who in his German youth saw the remains of his fellow townspeople hanging in trees after Allied bombings, declared that every composer must pursue an endless revolution.
In the United States the serial idea settled in as an endeavor largely associated with composers in academe. There the dichotomy rested for a while: the often academic atonalists and serialists in one camp, the more popularistic neoclassicists in the other. Then something remarkable happened. After the death of Schoenberg in 1951, Stravinsky turned away from his decades of neoclassic works and took up serialism, starting with his ballet Agon. The shock waves reverberated around the Western musical world. It was as if the commanding general of an army had gone over to the enemy. Stravinsky’s historic turn certified the triumph of serialism and the avant-garde in the forefront of new music. The revolutionists took over the shop. Two generations of neoclassicists found themselves out of the spotlight and sometimes out of a job.
But at the same time, a third train of thought in music seemed to contradict all the other camps. In his 1949 “Lecture on Nothing,” composer John Cage declared, “I have nothing to say / and I am saying it / and that is poetry / as I need it.” In the spirit of a Zen openness to the world, Cage rejected the whole past agenda of music: logic, emotion, meaning, beauty, form, and on and on. Any sound whatsoever (and even better, silence) he declared to be music. Cage began to compose by chance methods involving throwing dice, turning on radios, consulting the ancient Chinese book of prophecy, the I Ching. Cage and his disciples came to be called the aleatoric movement (from the Latin alea, “dice”). It had a wide influence; for some, the pursuit of meaninglessness appeared to be a way out of the disastrous ideologies and agendas of the past.
It seemed that the aleatoric ethos was ultimately contrary to the serial school—it certainly was to the neoclassical. In practice, however, there grew a rapprochement between serialists and aleatoricists. After all, they made similar kinds of sounds, they worked outside the mainstream of concert life, they were all generally denoted as “avant-garde,” and they often had an attitude of indifference unto hostility toward the bourgeois concert-going public and to popular culture.
All this had an air of authenticity and inevitability. For many postwar composers in Europe and America, after the manifest death of the old tonal system, serialism appeared the only alternative to musical anarchy, the avant-garde the best antidote to cultural boredom and stagnation. But as the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, an abiding problem refused to go away: not enough people were buying tickets to hear avant-garde or serial music. It didn’t put the backsides in the seats. By then much of Stravinsky was standard repertoire, Bartók catching on. But despite these occasional successes, the more revolutionary side of the musical equation could not find its way firmly into the mainstream. Then came the Vietnam War, and in its aftermath a new wave of revolution and reaction—a political reaction that is still ongoing as of this writing.
Perhaps inevitably, among younger American composers there arose a rebellion against the last generation’s rebellion. In 1964, as the “counterculture” emerged and beards and protests sprouted across the United States, Terry Riley wrote a chirping, hypnotic, semi-aleatoric piece called In C. That work and its fellows came to be called the minimalist school, led by composers Steve Reich and Philip Glass. This movement fled as far as possible from academic serialism to an utter simplicity and transparency of means. Minimalism’s relentless babble and beat rose, among other sources, from pop music. The success of minimalism had the effect of opening up a gigantic tract of musical territory between serialist arcana on the one hand, and five-note, hour-long minimalism on the other. Most composers of the last fifty years work somewhere in that middle territory. At the same time, from the 1960s on, the once somewhat well-defined realms of “popular,” “classical,” and “avant-garde” music, of “high” and “low” art, began to blur. They have been merging ever since.
In 1974 leading Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, visiting at Yale, told me: “We are free now.” He meant free from ideologies of tonal vs. atonal, of stylistic consistency, even of popular vs. classical. It was in the same period that another composer said, approximately, “It’s hard to make a revolution when, two revolutions ago, they already said anything goes.” The end-of-century postmodern movement seemed to revel in the impossibility of doing anything truly new. Instead, postmodern artists indulge in ironic games with the past, mixing and matching and mismatching among the arts once divided into “high” and “low.”
In effect, what the serialists of the 1950s feared came to pass: musical composition has evolved into a kind of dynamic anarchy that voraciously consumes every movement of the past. Some credit for this goes to the ubiquity of modern media, which preserves everything. It becomes harder to envision the future when the past is before our eyes and ears all the time. There is less of a natural ebb and flow of artistic evolution when every movement tends to stick around indefinitely.
More recent developments in new music, as they always do, have taken contrasting directions. On the one hand, there is a kind of postpunk rambunctiousness that has been dubbed “aesthetic brutalism.” On the other, in the United States, there are composers grouped around the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, dubbed the “Atlanta School.” This group offers listeners a warm embrace; it’s been called “the new niceness.” Among the Atlanta School composers is Jennifer Higdon, whose lushly neoromantic Violin Concerto won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize. On quite another hand, a school of spectralist composers explore different kinds of musical organization based on the acoustical properties of sound. Have a listen to Gérard Grisey’s growling, whistling Partiels, from 1975.
Thus my quick survey of modernism, postmodernism, and whatever period we’re in now. How to summarize it? The best way I can think of is as follows. For some years I taught at a conservatory in which at one point there were thirty-three student composers and five composition teachers. These thirty-eight composers wrote in thirty-eight distinct ways. Of the composers older and younger at my school, none wrote exclusively serial music, none were mainstream minimalists, none regularly involved with Cagean aleatoric procedures, none sounded much like Schoenberg or Stravinsky, some wrote both tonal and atonal pieces, only a few were detectably neoromantic or postmodern or close to the 1960s–1970s avant-garde. Yet every one of those influences were present in their work, in kaleidoscopic and unpredictable ways. That is what I mean by “dynamic anarchy.” It has its dangers, but also its potentials.
There are a lot of composers to cover in this section, more than in any other period. Maybe that’s because history has not yet finished its winnowing. Or it may be that because of modern media—radio, recordings, the easy availability of the entire repertoire online—fewer and fewer composers will fade away at all. As a lesser-known composer myself, whose stuff appears on YouTube and Spotify and hopefully will linger online forever, I’m not going to complain about that.