Experimentation and history

1. The emancipation of dissonance

With this decline in importance of harmony for modernist composers came the "emancipation" of dissonance proclaimed by Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), and the proliferation of individual tonal systems. The focus shifts to rhythm, counterpoint, and timbre. Harmonic tonality had served as a common system of reference for European composers since the 17th century, setting out the boundaries within which a composition had to function in order to count as "music". After about 1910, modernist music was identified by the absence of shared tonal systems.

A series of works by Schoenberg helps illustrates this transformation. Listen to the brief third portion of Schoenberg's string sextet "Transfigured Night" (op. 4, 1899):

 

It features the young composer as a master of late Romantic technique. Schoenberg was born into a Jewish family in Vienna, but his parents (originally from Szécsény and Prague) had moved there from Pozsony/Bratislava/Pressburg, so he was a Hungarian subject until 1918, and a Czech citizen until taking U.S. citizenship in 1941. In the early years of the century he was already becoming aware of the expanded tonal harmonies that signaled a crisis of classical composition. Utterly ripped out of context, here is the single uncatalogued dissonance in measure 42 that caused one Viennese concert group to reject performance of the piece:

 

Though he did not perhaps become the most beloved advocate of alternative modern forms, Schoenberg did eventually become the most successful (or, at least, consistent) developer of a thoroughgoing functional basis for new tonal forms.

Between 1907 and 1909 Schoenberg produced a series of works that are now regarded as seminal for the development of modern music. In his second string quartet (1908) Schoenberg took the unusual step of adding a soprano to the mix in the third and fourth movements, and then proceeded to strain the tonal structure to the utmost. 

 

"In the third and fourth movements the key is presented distinctly at all the main dividing points of the formal organization. Yet the overwhelming multitude of dissonances cannot be balanced any longer by occasional returns to such tonal triads as represent a key. It seemed inadequate to force a move into the Procrustean bed of a tonality without supporting it by harmonic progressions that pertain to it. This was my concern, and it should have occupied the mind of all my contemporaries also."

Now listen to "Colors," the third of the Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16 (1909):  

 

In Erwartung, (1909) Schoenberg again employs a soprano, but this time because he has abandoned thematic form entirely, at least in the usual sense: no themes are repeated, and motifs are not elaborated:

 

Finally, in Pierrot Lunaire (1912), a melodramatic work for string quintet and voice, Schoenberg introduces a further twist in the now somewhat-reduced emphasis on textual motif, calling for the use of Sprechstimme, a kind of half-singing, half-speaking recitation voice that is purposely to avoid strong adherence to a fixed set of pitches. In his instructions to performers, Schoenberg wrote, "It is never the task of performers to recreate the mood and character of the individual pieces on the basis of the meaning of words, but rather solely on the basis of the music. The extent to which the tone-painting-like rendering of the events and emotions of the text was important to the author is already found in the music." Listen to these four brief excerpts from the longer work. The earnestly blasphemous text by the Symbolist poet Albert Giraud concerns a clown engaged in various surreal activities. Let's sample a few of the movements:

1. Moondrunk (1:39):

 

Desires terrible and sweet
unnumbered drift in floods abounding.
The wine which through the eyes we drink
flows nightly from the moon in torrents

The poet, in an ecstasy,
drinks deeply from the holy chalice,
to heaven lifts up his entranced
head, and reeling quaffs and rains down
the wine which through the eyes we drink

2. Columbine (1:43):

 

13. Decapitation (2:13)

 

The moon, a polished scimitar...

(You get the idea)

18. The moonspot (0:54)

The "Moonspot" excerpt also happens to be a very elaborate canon, though it is difficult for the untrained ear to detect this without a musical score at hand. (The canon is a form in which each part plays the same line, but enters at a different time—think of "Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream." Variations include introducing the original line backwards, upside down, twice as fast or slow, etc.) The effect is not really meant to be virtuosic, however, since the main challenge of the tonal canon lay in how to resolve all the disparate lines into a concluding consonance, and here Schoenberg deliberately had no tonic chord to refer to.

(In the future, we'll add Schoenberg works in the post-1920 serialist mode, crucial to the notion that a proper "system" distinct to modernist music could be formally specified.)

2. Stravinsky

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971). The succès de scandale that followed the first performances of The Rite of Spring in 1913 has made it perhaps the most notorious modernist composition of the twentieth century. Though it was the famous impresario Sergei Diaghilev who commissioned the work for his ballet troupe, Stravinsky was adamant that the work should be able to stand on its own as a concert piece, and we will somewhat arbitrarily leave aside the dramatic aspects for purposes of this discussion. In any event, Stravinsky did not see the music as illustrating the ballet, but rather regarded the ballet as a visual extension of the musical devices employed in the work. There is indeed little to relate in the way of plot in The Rite of Spring. Wrote Stravinsky in his autobiography, "I saw in imagination a solemn pagan rite: wise elders, seated in a circle, watching a young girl dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of spring."

Your first reaction might be to find irony in the fact that this icon of modern music was motivated by an impulse so common in nineteenth-century Romantic music, the fascination with a mythic national/ethnic past (in this case, Russia's). Suppress that urge, for irony suggests an underlying incongruity between intended and actual outcomes, when modernist musical technique was in fact never the artistic tabula rasa polemically portrayed by the generation that followed Stravinsky and Schoenberg. The Rite of Spring drew heavily upon folk melodies, but simply refused to do so with the kind of ham-handed tunefulness and oom-pah rhythms that one encounters in so many ethnographic musical arrangements tricked up as original "artistic" compositions. Stravinsky strenuously denied these sources, even as he devoted remarkable effort to scholarly study of ethnographic texts. The Augurs of Spring, the Ritual Abduction, and the Spring Rounds sections from Part I were all taken from an anthology of Lithuanian folk songs compiled by a Polish priest named Anton Juszkiewicz. Other tunes came from compilations by Stravinsky's own teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov. Other tunes seem to have been transcribed by Stravinsky himself during summers at his family estate in Ukraine. Insofar as nineteenth-century nationalist currents served as motives for this kind of historicizing spadework, they can properly be said to have been crucial sources for modernism in music.

Whole books have been written about The Rite of Spring, but let's just take a few small examples of innovation. As you listen, note how the composer repeatedly changes the time signature, breaking down the sense of rhythm that might otherwise lend structure to the work. And rather than employ different combinations of the more pleasant thirds and sixths:

, 

Stravinsky relies heavily on more austere fourth intervals

 

in the opening, a hint of the greater chromatic violence to come. In the second portion of Part One, The Augurs of Spring, we encounter the most famous chord

 

of the entire piece. This is perhaps the most concise illustration of what Stravinsky did to the diatonic system. You might think this is somehow atonality, but it is actually bitonality, using two keys at once. There is a nice E major triad (though Stravinsky's notation conceals this):

 

And a perfectly reasonable E-flat major triad

that happens to have an added seventh to make this

. 

Add them together and you get this:

. 

Paris was shocked! Without further ado, listen to a complete performance of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring: 

Part 1:

 

Part 2:

.

For a taste of Sergei Prokofiev's own experimentation with primitivism, try the somewhat less earnest "Tshushbog and the Dance of the Spirits"

from his Scythian Suite (1915), likewise built around myths of pre-historic forerunners north and east of the Black Sea. Listen for similar rhythms of "enemy on the attack" later in the fifth movement of Alexander Nevsky (below).