Beyond Romanticism

These programs for a scientific musicology (with their normative implications for composition) faded out in the early twentieth century with the development of modern idioms of composition. How did this come about? Basically we have learned to ignore the acoustical science regarding the purported asymmetry between major and minor harmonies, thus rendering the search for a "scientific" harmonic dualism superfluous. We no longer ask, suggests Alexander Rehding, ‘What does a given theory do, and is what it does correct?’, but: ‘Why does this theory want its users to think about tonal harmony in this way and not in any other way?’

You might be tempted to think that the musical modernism we aim to study here—roughly from the 1890s through the 1920s—might be, in large part, a product of a desire to escape these "scientific" strictures while inventing ever newer tonal systems that surpassed the carefully prescribed limits of "classical" music. That would be misleading, however, since so many nineteenth-century composers were already quite self-consciously "modern," and looked to music theory to ratify the progressive status of their music. This was not simply newness for its own sake, but something more, as Jürgen Habermas and countless others have emphasized: invoking the "new" is also a symptom of the reflexivity of modernity.

For modernist composers, music theory (aided by music history) often performed a dual role, serving as a paradigmatic obstruction to be surpassed in one’s own works, but also providing the ultimate ratification of their status as innovations. That the composers of high modernism might no longer have subscribed to notions of history as objective progress did not necessarily change this reflexive dynamic. In this fashion, writes Rehding, "music theory becomes a critical force with the power to demarcate the limits of tonal harmony and to conjecture the future of music." Throughout the period that concerns us, discontents about the principles of scientific analysis of music motivated numerous attempts to "re-enchant" music, not least through exploration of pre-modern, "primitive" sounds (Stravinsky!).

There is another related problem: the aesthetics of transgression, especially in the extreme form practiced by Wagner. Both Wagner and Franz/Ferenc Liszt greatly expanded the range of permitted harmonies and the rate of harmonic change. The epitome of the Romantic cult of musical genius, Liszt insisted that every new composition should contain at least one new chord, yet this eventually lead to the weakening of the diatonic system itself.