Modernism

Modernism
Modernism
Leon Botstein
https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.40625
Published in print: 20 January 2001
Published online: 2001
This version: 23 August 2023
Updated in this version

updated and revised
A term that describes works of literature, painting, architecture, design, and music that share
characteristics with respect to a multi-faceted movement in aesthetic practice. Modernism flourished at
the end of the late 19th century and continued to evolve and play a significant role, particularly in musical
practice and culture, in various incarnations until the last quarter of the 20th century, primarily in Europe
and North America. Modernism is therefore a historical designation related to a specific era. Modernism in
music, between the 1890s and the end of the Cold War, was characterized by an explicit reaction to
established traditions; it was motivated by the self-conscious and assertive conviction that the historical
moment in which artists, writers, and composers lived constituted a radical rupture with the past, thereby
invalidating the aesthetic inheritance bequeathed by the late 18th and 19th centuries. For Modernists the
concrete conditions of life were sufficiently novel to merit a distinctive response in the making of art.
The term ‘modernism’ can, however, in the case of music, be used more broadly to denote a wider, more
eclectic, and less radical range of artistic responses to modernity in terms of chronology and style.
Appropriations of tradition and reconfigurations of past practices in response to the character of
modernity can therefore be understood as ‘modernist’ even if they lack surface resemblances to the self-
conscious radical discontinuities exhibited by Modernist music during the late 19th and early 20th
centuries. Music that, on its surface, resisted the imperative of a clear break with past practices but yet
took into account modernity’s transformation of economic production and societal realities, including the
impact of modern technology, can therefore be termed ‘modernist’. Elements of a distinct musical
response to modernity can be located even in the works of so-called ‘conservative’ 20th-century
composers such as Jean Sibelius, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Walter Piston.
Modernity is understood in this context as the condition of life created by massive changes that occurred
th
beginning in the later 18 century, and subsequently during and after the later stages of industrialization.
It includes, to cite just a few examples: in transportation, innovations such as railroads, steamships,
automobiles, jet planes and rockets; in communication, developments from the wireless and telephone to
the internet and smartphone; in construction, advances from the electric light and the elevator to the
engineering of high rise buildings; in calculation, the evolution from the adding machine to the computer;
in medicine, progress from Louis Pasteur’s discoveries to CAT scans and the MRI; in basic science,
innovations in physics, particularly relativity and subsequent developments in quantum mechanics,
molecular biology, and genetics; and in warfare, the shift from ballistics to industrialized genocide and
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Modernism
nuclear warheads. Modernism, in the work of artists, including composers and performers in music,
responded explicitly to such contemporary disruptive realities in daily life and the politics that
accompanied them, particularly in the scale of violence in the modern conduct of war. European
colonialism, America’s dominance, the two World Wars and the Cold War were the prominent events that
helped define modernism as a specific 20th-century aesthetic phenomenon.
Modernism as a distinct historical movement, and as a term defining all aesthetic responses to modernity
(that occurred at different moments around the globe during the past 150 years) shares the premise of a
perceived unprecedented historic discontinuity with the past. Insofar as modernity was defined by
increasing rationalization and bureaucratization, and the domination of urban life at the expense of the
rural, cherished inherited convictions about the nature of art came under close scrutiny. Modernity and
Modernism sharpened debates about the notion of ‘art for art’s sake’ and strengthened music’s claim to a
privileged status as exemplary of the potential autonomy of the aesthetic realm. At the same time
Modernism also fueled the belief that art was a just another form of human and social activity inextricably
bound up with and influenced by contemporary political and social realities. Modernism simultaneously
both challenged the legitimacy of tradition, and also reinvented it by reinterpreting the past. Even in its
most radical incarnations, Modernism demanded a reappraisal of the narrative of history, even when its
precepts overtly denied continuities with history (as argued by futurists before World War I and by artists
aligned with the Bolshevik revolution during the early years of the Soviet era, and with the Mexican
Revolution of 1910). At the outset of radical Modernism about 1900, particularly in music, the necessity and
validity of evident narrative coherence were challenged. Musical Modernism was consequently influenced
by debates over the philosophy of language, particularly its limits, and the conceits of realism. These
emerged first in the late 19th century and subsequently flowered in the first half of the 20th, both in
continental philosophy (Fritz Mauthner, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger) and the Anglo-
American philosophical tradition (G.E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin, Nelson Goodman, and
John Searle).
One of the salient shared general characteristics of Modernism was an anxiety that ever more challenging
and restrictive conditions faced the artist as an individual in the modern world. Modernism consequently
has propelled the prestige of originality in art, and the individual artist as a resister to conformity and as a
rebel determined to secure freedom and individuality in the face of a mass society. At the same time,
particularly in modern autocracies, Modernist strategies were absorbed into a collective aesthetic in which
the artist is seen as a representative of a community and a voice on behalf of a dominant often utopian
consensus in values. 20th-century Modernism in music also found inspiration in contemporary advances
in individual psychology, particularly Freudian psychoanalysis; Arnold Schoenberg’s 1909 Erwartung,
Alban Berg’s 1937 Lulu, and Bohulsav Martinu’s 1937 Julietta are examples.
Modernism was allied with philosophies in epistemology and ethics critical of rationalism and
metaphysical systems and often with political radicalism. This explains its link to the notion that art must
take into account social and political injustice in the world, underscore the impossibility of normative
metaphysical truths or universal absolutes, and challenge claims on behalf of ordinary, seemingly
commonsensical notions of reason, truth, and ethical progress in history. Consequently, Modernism has
been embraced as vital to rescuing the possibility of freedom in the face of the perils of modern mass
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Modernism
society. Modernism, particularly in music, became an instrument of criticism and resistance against the
tyrannies specific to modernity, notably the conformism imposed by modern dictatorships (by Hitler,
Mussolini, and Stalin) and by populism in modern democracies dominated by large-scale industrial
capitalism (in the United States and during the Cold War in Western Europe).
Nonetheless, self-conscious radical Modernism and eclectic aesthetic responses to modernity found
themselves allied to seemingly contradictory goals. On the one hand, the Modernist belief in an objective
historical discontinuity did not deter modernist composers from pursuing the ambition to assert new
formalist and normative ideals of beauty and structural integrity. On the other hand, Modernism sought to
debunk all universal norms and the plausibility of objective aesthetic principles. Most often, however,
Modernism privileged the legitimacy of subjectivity and originality even when the claim to a unique
individuality was derided as merely decorative and superficial. Modernism in the arts, including music, as
a specific historical era in Western history, and as global phenomenon in the later 20th century and early
21th, has become a central preoccupation in the academic study of the arts. This institutional framework
has deepened and differentiated the understanding of Modernism as a historical phenomenon – the
varieties of music in modernity, the philosophy of music, as well as Modernism’s influence on concepts of
tradition and precedent in history.
The following survey of Modernism in music focusses on a multi-faceted but distinct and continuous
tradition within 20th-century composition in Europe and the Americas. It also addresses 20th-century
trends in aesthetic theory, scholarship, and performing practice. Modernism is a consequence of the
fundamental conviction among successive generations of composers since the late 19th century, that the
means of musical expression in the 20th century and 21st had to be adequate to the unique and radical
character of the age. The appropriateness of the term ‘Modernism’ to describe a coherent and discrete
historical movement that flourished in the hundred years between 1880 and 1989 has been underscored by
the currency of the word ‘postmodern’, which refers to the music, art, and ideas that emerged during the
last quarter of the century as a reaction to Modernism (see Postmodernism). The word ‘Modernism’ has
functioned throughout both polemically and analytically; it is applied loosely to disparate musical styles.
What links its many strands in usage with respect to music is the perception of a shared debt to a specific
historical context and a shared understanding of that context.
1. Origins.
Modernism first took shape as a historical phenomenon between the death of Richard Wagner in 1883 and
the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Before the death of Wagner, the term ‘modern’ was used, but
interchangeably with ‘new’, ‘recent’, and ‘contemporary’. In its Wagnerian usage it denoted an expansion
of musical Romanticism through the use of a wider palette of harmonic usage centered on chromaticism,
and an expansion of instrumental sonorities organized around the ideal of a narrative. The link between
narration and music was set against an inherited ‘classicism’; the ‘modern’ in the Wagnerian sense
appropriated and extended the largely formalist musical procedures of classicism as a new means of
conveying stories, images, and ideas. Wagnerian late Romanticism construed music as a dramatic art and
challenged a classicist claim that music was ‘absolute’ – that its meaning was auto-poetic, self-
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referential, and contingent on the autonomy of musical materials and fundamentally distinct from
language and images. The structures and procedures in music, according to the tenets of classicism, were
understood as unique to music and their aesthetic value was independent.
Romanticism in music, during the early decades of the 19th century before 1848 – the era of Mendelssohn,
Schumann, and Chopin – enjoyed an exceptional prestige within the arts. At its start, musical romanticism
sought a stable synthesis between a new expressive emotionalism, including a connection to literature and
painting that after 1815 seemed weak or absent in the classical repertoire, even in the music of Haydn and
Mozart. Beethoven was, in this sense, understood retrospectively, by subsequent generations, as
exemplary of this new impetus in music that sought novel musical means of expressing interiority and the
human response to the external world. Beethoven succeeded without abandoning classical forms and
procedures. From Wagner on, modernists, particularly before 1914, would find inspiration in Beethoven as
a musical dramatist and innovator, and as a composer who prefigured Wagner’s modernism and expanded
decisively instrumental music’s power as a medium of emotion and narration.
The example of Beethoven nonetheless triggered a resurgence of aesthetic controversies that had
flourished already during the 18th-century. In the middle of the 19th century, ‘ancients’ (now identified
with Viennese classicism) were contrasted pejoratively with ‘moderns’ (Berlioz and Liszt); skepticism
about new music in terms of its quality and value – even Beethoven’s, particularly from the late period –
pervaded the 1840s and 50s, indicating the lasting influence of 18th-century aesthetic criteria. At the same
time, by the early 1860s, post-1789 revolutionary Romanticism’s aesthetic response to a perceived
moment of dramatic historical change (as visible in the criticism of Friedrich Schlegel and E.T.A Hoffmann
and the painting of Philipp Otto Runge, Caspar David Friedrich, and Eugene Delacroix) demanded a
musical analogue. Beethoven and early Romantic composers of the generation born between1809 and 1813
came to be regarded positively as meeting that need, and they became more fully embraced as harbingers
of innovations pioneered later by Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner. Although the reaction to early- and
mid-19th-century Romantic experiments in form and harmonic usage (by Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn, Liszt,
Chopin) were, by and large, welcomed, the subsequent innovations of modernism, those overwhelmingly
associated with Wagner, caused a sharp rift in musical culture during the second half of the 19th century.
The stunning international influence of Wagner between the 1860s and 1914 led to a vigorous rejection of
the modern, understood in Wagner’s terms, by his detractors such as Max Bruch and Carl Reinecke.
Consequently, by 1900, the word ‘modern’ had become familiar equally as an epithet of derision and
praise. A fear of the modern in its Wagnerian incarnation reinvigorated the examination of music’s history
and resulted in new appeals to traditions from pre-modern eras, particularly through a re-evaluation of
Medieval and Renaissance music (a particular interest of Wagner’s rival, Brahms, and also of a turn-of-
the-century Viennese critic and opponent of Gustav Mahler as a composer, Robert Hirschfeld). This gained
momentum in Germany and France after 1870 and various ideologies of neo-classicism came to the fore,
as in the case of Vincent d’Indy. But by the end of the 19th century tempers cooled and a compositional
synthesis between the Wagnerian and anti-Wagnerian emerged; most of musical culture at the turn of the
century exhibited a sustained and eclectic, powerful and essentially conservative historicism that,
ironically, absorbed and routinized many of Wagner’s musical innovations. Nonetheless, in the final
decades of the 19th century, musical modernism, i.e., Wagnerism, still seemed, to many observers,
dangerous to a healthy contemporary culture. It was regarded as a symptom of degeneracy and a hallmark
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of a pervasive and pessimistic ideology of cultural decline. Doubt was cast on the cultural and aesthetic
potential of the present, particularly in the context of rising rates of literacy and the expansion of the
audience well beyond the ranks of the 18th-century aristocracy of connoisseurs and skilled amateurs.
Wagner himself used the term ‘modern’ in 1849 as an epithet directed against Meyerbeer as a way of
characterizing grand opera’s cheap concessions to popular and philistine taste. A noble art, music, was
being debased by those who sought to use it to celebrate and exploit the spiritually corrupt aspects of
modern life, including trade, industry, and journalistically manipulated public opinion. The irony was that
Wagner’s modernist achievements, for all the surface of criticism of modern politics and economics
evident in Wagner’s writings and libretti, exploited the tastes of the new and the greatly enlarged listening
public. Wagnerism thrived in modernity. Its procedures inspired music capable of immediate
comprehension. Wagnerism fueled public enthusiasm and an easily acquired attachment to music,
particularly the genres of opera and orchestral music. By the end of the century, modernism, in its
Wagnerian and immediate post Wagnerian incarnation as representing the ‘artwork of the future’ had
gained a positive meaning as accessible, populist, and anti-aristocratic. Through Wagner, music became
an art of realism and narration.
Furthermore, following Charles Baudelaire’s defense of Wagner in 1861 and his use of the word ‘modern’
in his 1863 The Painter of Modern Life, the term was applied, also in a positive sense, to a cadre of
revolutionary avant-garde composers that at the end of the 19th century rejected outdated historical
models, even Wagner. The modern in music at the turn of the century was seen as meeting head on the
overwhelming character of the new in contemporary life (including the invention of new instruments –
the Wagner tuba, the saxophone, and the technological improvement of the piano and of wind, percussion,
and brass instruments). Music needed to progress beyond Wagnerism to evoke a new spirituality through
art that penetrated beyond the material surface of modernity. Modernism in music became a cause as a
sign of historical progress, both in spirit and self-awareness. The link between Baudelaire’s notion of the
modern and Wagner’s example can be seen in the frequent application of the term ‘modern’ to describe the
work of composers born between 1860 and 1900 who were influenced by Wagner but went beyond him,
including Gustav Mahler, Edward Elgar, Claude Debussy, the young Karol Szymanowski, Arnold
Schoenberg, Bela Bartok, and Richard Strauss. By the early 1890s, the word ‘modern’ was used once again
equally in assigning praise and blame to describe new music that left Wagner behind and experimented
with form, tonality, and orchestration in a manner evocative of the radical qualities of contemporary
culture and society. In instrumental music the modern at the turn of the century was associated with the
tone poem, multi movement symphonies, concertos reliant on virtuosity, and large-scale stage works with
naturalist, symbolist, and expressionist characteristics. Huge choral and orchestral forces and novel
instrumental effects became commonplace. The modifier ‘modern’ was also applied to miniaturist forms
– études and preludes – particularly for solo piano, as in the cases of Debussy and Alexander Skryabin. By
1900, the word ‘modern’ in music described the logical extensions of late Wagnerism and Romanticism in
a coherent generic sense; it meant the contemporary, for better, among enthusiasts, and for worse, among
pessimistic conservatives fearful for the future of classical cultural norms of musical beauty that were
being overwhelmed by the expressive narrative excesses of late post-Wagnerian Romanticism and its
descendants.
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In the first decades of the 20th century, a reaction against the new music by young composers became
apparent. Nonetheless, even when rejecting the influence of Wagner, throughout the 20th century, musical
Modernism has nonetheless retained its initial intellectual debt to Wagnerian ideas and conceits regarding
the link between music and a progressive idea of history. The art of music needed to anticipate and
ultimately reflect the logic of history. In Wagner’s view, the imperative of art was a dynamic originality
emergent from the past but obliged to transcend it. The history of music developed progressively,
rendering initially novel and forward-looking styles dominant over time, only to witness that dominance
undermined and superseded by the next wave of prescient change as history moved forwards. Success with
the established audience of one’s time was not a criterion of aesthetic merit or historical significance.
Legitimate originality in art was inherently futuristic, progressive, oppositional, and critical. It pierced the
surface of reigning tastes, undermined them, and revealed hidden truths and profound historical currents.
Art true to its own time, whether called modern or the artwork of the future, forged a leading edge in
history; it constituted a prophetic force for change. It unmasked ills, penetrated the veil of civility, and
attacked hypocrisy and complacency that masqueraded as refined taste. The genuinely modern in music
would always therefore be initially rejected by contemporary critics and connoisseurs. Consonant with
such Wagnerian conceits, the first generation of 20th-century Modernist composers, incuding those who
sought to shed a debt to Wagner and his followers readily embraced the historical relativism implicit in the
motto inscribed on Joseph Maria Olbrich’s 1897 Secession building in Vienna: Der Zeit ihre Kunst: Der Kunst
ihre Freiheit (‘To each age its art: to art, its freedom’). Music shared with the other arts not only the
obligation to engage the historical uniqueness of modern life but the need to bring forward the subjective
and privileged experience of the creative artist, whose perceptions and experiences made the aesthetic
realm reveal meaning and truths in life otherwise hidden. In America, Charles Ives shared similar
sentiments. Early 20th-century Modernism, particularly in fin-de-siècle Vienna after Mahler’s departure
in 1907, reasserted a classical conceit that contradicted Wagnerian aesthetics. Music, in part because of the
uniqueness of its materials and its dual function as a domestic and private art as well as a public spectacle,
was reimagined as crucial to an organic and encompassing autonomous aesthetic experience in modernity
whose impact in life would extend beyond the cultivation of a socially accepted taste. Modernism could
challenge the conventions of appreciation in the arts, whether in theaters, museums, literature, or concert
halls dominated by a historical repertoire whose canonic content had ceased to expand beyond the
Wagnerian.
2. Musical characteristics.
Despite the use of the term ‘modern’ in connection with Mahler (whose distortions of symphonic form,
penchant for fragmentation, unconventional thematic material and sonorities, and use of novel
instruments, including cowbells, mandolins, and hammer blows (as well as silences) that inspired later
Modernists and their defenders such as Anton von Webern and Paul Bekker), Debussy (on account of his
uses of harmony and interest in non-Western music), Skryabin (also for harmonic originality), and
Strauss (whose Salome and Elektra were considered thoroughly avant-garde), these four figures were
ultimately understood primarily as crucial precursors of a distinct 20th-century Modernism. By 1912
Strauss was viewed (incorrectly, as it turns out) as having turned away from Modernism; Mahler died in
1911, Skryabin in 1915, and Debussy in 1918. Ferruccio Busoni, Arnold Schoenberg, Franz Schreker, and Igor
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Stravinsky (and Charles Ives, in retrospect) were therefore recognized before 1914 as the first actual
proponents of 20th-century Modernism, alongside less well-known but notorious personalities such as
Leo Ornstein who were known as ‘futurists’ who entirely abandoned the conventions of late Romanticism.
The self-conscious search in the years immediately prior to 1914 by Modernist composers and performers
for a language of music adequate to, reflective of, and critical of the contemporary moment revealed a
conception of modernity dominated by the progress of science, technology, and industry, and by
positivism, mechanization, urbanization, mass culture, imperialism, and nationalism. A heightened
sensitivity to the isolation and alienation of the individual, economic injustice, and political powerlessness
in a mass modern society inspired a concomitant intensity regarding how personal and confessional
emotions and thoughts might be expressed in music, including pessimism, cynicism, and idealism, and a
flirtation with the occult and mystical. An aggressive sense of newness and discontinuity pervaded the first
years of the century.
The aesthetic reaction to modernity before 1914 even elicited an enthusiasm for the new defined as a return
to an imagined historical pre-modern ‘primitivism’ prior to modernity that evoked a ‘true’ human nature
unspoiled by civilization. Ornstein’s Wild Men’s Dance (1914) and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (1913) and Les
Noces (1923) mirror an ambivalence, ambiguity, and anxiety regarding reason, progress, and materialism
that was widespread immediately before and after World War I. The shared assumption surrounding fin-
de-siècle and early 20th-century Modernism was that the present (and particularly, its public for art and
culture) was overwhelmed by positivism and materialism that invalidated the use in music with overt
markers of historicism. Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of late 19th-century modernity was well known. The
historical tastes and aesthetic styles characteristic of much mid- and late-19th-century painting,
architecture, and music were rejected. Overt departures from immediate historical precedents, such as
sustained dissonances, became hallmarks of early Modernism. A pervasive sense of dread about the
societal and cultural consequences of modernity favored a cult of the personal subjective experience of the
artist; even the transparent music of Erik Satie, widely regarded as anti-Romantic, is an example. In this
regard, early 20th-century musical Modernism was indebted to turn-of-the-century Modernist advances
in painting, particularly Impressionism, Expressionism, and Cubism. Debussy’s La Mer (1905), Mikolajus
Konstantinas Čiurlionis’s tone poems (in the Forest and The Sea) from the turn of the century, and Ralph
Vaughan Williams’ ‘London’ Symphony (1910) are cases in point. Edgar Varèse captured the subjective and
political aspects of the 20th-century Modernist credo accurately when he wrote, in 1917, ‘I dream of
instruments obedient to my thought and which, with their contribution of a whole new world of
unsuspected sounds, will lend themselves to the exigencies of my inner rhythm’, and, later, in 1936, ‘the
very newness of the mechanism of life is forcing our activities and our forms of human association to
break with the traditions and methods of the past in the effort to adapt themselves to circumstances’.
The assumptions underlying the compositional traditions of the late 19th century that underwent scrutiny
in the early 20th century included notions of formal coherence and continuity, the use of dense decorative
sonorities, the reliance on recognizable rhythmic symmetries, repetition, and regularity (often to enhance
narrative and description), the dependence on traditional instruments and illustrative sonic effects, and
the attraction to monumental and extended compositional forms, as in the case of Elgar, Mahler, Strauss,
and Anton Bruckner. But the most significant object of Modernist criticism was the concept and practice of
tonality. Tonality was music’s primary analogue to realism in painting and sculpture and the use of
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language to describe, characterize, explain, and narrate in literature, notably in the prose novel. Distorting
tonal expectations, abandoning tonality and replacing it with new systems of pitch organization (or the
lack of pitch coherence) defined the confrontation with inherited normative expectations regarding
meaning in musical rhetoric and expression as well as beauty in sound and timbre. Standard tonal
practices had been challenged, especially in the construction of melody and in orchestration, already in the
works of Strauss, Mahler, Debussy, and the early Stravinsky, particularly in their uses of instrumental
texture and the voice. The link between music and narration in Wagnerism was upended. In Strauss’ case,
he indulged in an anti-metaphysical radical and shocking realism, illustrating banalities in life, as in his
Sinfonia Domestica (1903). In Mahler music became a highly personalized means of psychological
confession, including his philosophical quest for spiritual alternatives to the dominance of materialism
and utilitarianism. Mahler cultivated irony, satire, and the power of music to shock; he was insulted and
derided by the critics and much of the audience. In Mahler and Strauss, as well as in the music of Debussy
and Stravinsky, decorum and comfort were shattered, and expectations, conventions, categories,
boundaries, and limits abandoned. The commonplace late 19th-century alignment of music with language
and images was intentionally disfigured and distorted. Empirical experimentation followed the example of
science, and resulted in the confident exploration of new sounds. The link between the visual and the
musical was anti-sentimental and anti-pastoral, and tended to the abstract, as in the case of Skryabin’s
forays into parallelisms between harmony and color. World War I accelerated the pre-war search among
composers for new systems of pitch organization as alternatives to tonality (including the use of
alternative scales – modal, pentatonic, and octatonic – and microtones), as well as for new instruments,
often the result of technological advances, from the theremin (1920), the ondes martenot (1928), and
industrial machines, to electronic devices, including, after 1945, the synthesizer and the computer. As the
Italian futurist Luigi Russolo wrote in 1913, ‘We must break out of this narrow circle of pure musical
sounds, and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds’. The employment of Sprechstimme by
Schoenberg in Pierrot lunaire (1912) is a notable early example of a Modernist innovation; text and sound
no longer ran together along parallel logics of correspondence and description. The music inherent in
speech, not the meanings of words, became elements of the compositional fabric, as in the music of Leoš
Janáček. Modernism before 1914 and after also exhibited experimentation with the integration into
musical compositions of contemporary ambient urban and rural sounds (e.g., car horns, railroads,
airplanes, marching bands, card shuffling, and cowbells) as well as fragments from popular urban
entertainments.
3. Aesthetic aspects.
Modernism in music was propelled by more than aesthetic ambitions. The embrace of the uniquely new in
music was expressed by seeking inspiration outside of the exclusively auto-poetic framework of the
history of music. A critique of the link between ethics and aesthetics in contemporary life and thought was
a major impetus behind musical Modernism. The 18th-century conviction that a link between the good and
the beautiful had to be forged anew for modernity was revived. The connection between art and society
underwent reconsideration alongside the wide variety of Marxist convictions. Modernism challenged the
social uses of music as supportive of the status quo. The enjoyment of music exemplified by the turn-of-
the-century urban concert audience and public for music – in the home, concert halls, dance halls, and
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operetta and opera houses – obscured the horrors of contemporary life. Modernism sought to disrupt this
function of music in domestic and public life; music wedded to tradition was too affirmative and too
suggestive of complacency in the face of human suffering. A critique of a hypocritical respectability,
conveniently camouflaged by musical surfaces suggestive of normative beauty was, from the start, a
driving force behind early 20th-century compositional innovations. Reigning habits of listening were
understood as too dependent on conservative expectations regarding tonal music’s logic and its alluring,
sensual, expressive and story-telling properties. Repetition, lush sonorities, and a reliance on extra-
musical narratives were chief targets in the turn-of-the-century discourse about music. Popular
historicist music dependent on 19th-century practices failed to differentiate, as Schoenberg argued (in the
spirit of Adolf Loos’s essay, ‘Ornament as Crime’, 1910, and Karl Kraus’s writings) decoration and
ornament from structure, and style from idea as expressed in the use of sounds alone. Contemporary taste
appeared distorted by a dependence on decorative façades that used the aesthetic to mask a void, a deceit,
and a dominant thoughtlessness in life. The extensive and widespread bourgeois audience in Europe of
concert-goers and amateurs before World War I was seen as addicted to music as comforting
entertainment and affirmation. They were unable and unwilling to confront the unique characteristics,
transformative power, and ethical character of true musical art. The popularity of third-rate operettas
(before and after Franz Lehár’s Die lustige Witwe, 1905) on the eve of World War I was just one symptom of
this malaise. Music journalism was viewed as playing a nefarious role by defending historically contingent,
established late Romantic compositional conventions as reflective of timeless, normative criteria of beauty
in music. The social critique implicit in Modernist ideology created an uncomfortable and unanticipated
affinity between Modernism and conservative cultural criticism influenced by Matthew Arnold’s Culture
and Anarchy (1869) and Max Nordau’s Entartung (1892, Eng. trans. 1895 as Degeneration). Both were
pessimistic and condemned mass society and the expansion of the audience for music and culture as
symptoms of the decline in standards and the corruption of taste. However, the conservative line of
criticism targeted Modernism as the most persuasive instance of artistic mediocrity. By masquerading as
uniquely contemporary, Modernist composers succeeded. The audience had become susceptible to the
corrupting influence of manipulative artists such as Wagner and his followers. Particularly after World War
I, Modernists and their defenders would never entirely escape the charges of intolerance, snobbery,
elitism, and charlatanism. Both Modernism and the conservative critique of Modernism however mirrored
a shared suspicion of and distaste for the democratization of culture made possible, ironically, by the
technological advances of modernity, from printing to electronic reproduction and transmission. In
contrast to this critique, the social and ethical criticism of the musical bourgeois culture of the 19th
century apparent in musical Modernism would, ironically, take the form of novel assertions of nationalism
located in a distant history, the pre-industrial past. Pre-modern rural folk music (in the music of Bela
Bartok, Karol Szymanowski, Alexander Mosolov, Ives, Carlos Chávez, William Grant Still, and Ralph
Vaughan Williams) became sources of musical novelty (alongside contemporary urban sounds) in terms of
melodic ideas, counterpoint, timbres, and rhythm. For these composers, musical ‘modernism’ was a
strategy on behalf of the renewal of humanism, freedom, community and democracy within the
framework of an ardent but not xenophobic or militaristic nationalism.
4. Performance.
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From its inception, Modernism influenced not only the direction of musical composition but also
performing practices, initially in public concerts and later and more significantly in radio broadcast and
recording. This reflected one of Modernism’s ambitions: to represent history objectively, and rescue pre-
Romantic music, particularly Baroque and Classical music from the excesses of Romanticism, especially
Wagner and Wagnerism, which privileged the imposition of exaggerated emotion and imputed meaning in
the ordinary sense of words and images on the music of the past. In the early 20th century, especially after
1918, and again after 1945, a new rationalism and an anti-Romantic and historically critical formalism in
performance flourished. Modernism inspired an early 20th-century Mozart revival. Performance practices
inspired by Modernism were aligned with the Modernist foregrounding of logic and structure in new music
as an antidote to the romantic emphasis on musical realism (as in Strauss) and extended expressiveness.
Medieval and Renaissance music were rediscovered as proper constituents of the concert repertory. This
spurred the return to the use of ‘original’ keyboard instruments that preceded the modern piano.
Modernist performance practice focused on clarity, objectivity, and historical and stylistic criticism with
respect to musical texts, new and old. The improvisatory, seemingly over-inflected and boldly personal
and expressive character of the late 19th-century performances of the reigning classical canon,
particularly Beethoven, had come under attack already before 1914, notably from Heinrich Schenker, who
was outraged by Mahler’s free-wheeling interpretation of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. An austere,
explicitly anti-sentimental Modernist approach to performance (eschewing the excessive use of vibrato,
slides, portamento, and tempo rubato) evolved by mid-century and came to dominate; examples include
the conducting of Felix Weingartner, Arturo Toscanini, George Szell, Hermann Scherchen, and Fritz
Reiner, the interpretative strategy of the Kolisch Quartet (and later the Juilliard and Guarneri Quartets),
the pianism of Artur Schnabel, Rudolf Serkin, and Glenn Gould, and the refined approach to the violin
displayed by Joseph Szigeti and Jascha Heifetz. Insofar as Modernism helped impel and sustain a
revisionist objectivity towards the past, it profoundly influenced academic historical scholarship,
principles of textual criticism and editing, and music theory. Not surprisingly, Guido Adler’s critical
construct of the methods and goals of musicology made him sympathetic to the innovations of Schoenberg
and his protégés, many of whom had been students of Adler in music history. The newness of Modernism,
for Adler, writing in 1919, was justified as evidence for the uniqueness in periods of historical
development; therefore, as a ‘child of the times’, he found the tendency to ‘suppress living composers with
inappropriate comparisons with works from the past’ unreasonable and intolerable. Scholarly objectivity
with respect to history became a legitimating conceit of Modernism. The Modernist penchant for
historically based performing practices, pre-Classical repertory, and period instruments retained its links
to new composition. It paralleled the neo-classicism after World War I, as evident in the music of Paul
Hindemith, Ernest Bloch, Alfredo Casella, Gian Francesco Malipiero, and the neo-classical works of
Stravinsky. The legacy of the 19th century – historicism and Romanticism – continued to be viewed as
complicit with injustice and tyranny. This response would be particularly pronounced after 1945, in the
wake of the alliance between Romantic aesthetics and fascism. The Modernist antidote was a radical
reassertion through innovation on behalf of the inherent autonomous logic of musical materials that once
defined classicist musical practice. The reigning taste among leading performers for late Romanticism and
its historicist repertoire, and for subjective improvisation in performance was undermined, particularly in
the 1950s and 60s, in the era of the high fidelity recording on vinyl long playing records. The Modernist-
inspired revival of interest in pre-Classical eras, particularly Baroque, medieval, and Renaissance music,
also coincided with the virtual disappearance from the repertoire of music by Max Reger, Karl Goldmark,
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Nicolai Medtner, Alexander Glazunov, and Camille Saint-Saens (to name just a few), the leading fin-de-
siècle American composers (George Chadwick, Edward MacDowell, and Amy Beach), and the critical
devaluation of Tchaikovsky, Massenet, Rachmaninoff, and Puccini.
5. Social and cultural aspects.
The extensive commerce associated with musical life (in publishing, concert life, and instrument
manufacture) that had developed during the last quarter of the 19th century was held by the early 1900s as
partially responsible for the prevalence of a new philistinism and debased listening habits. Modernism was
endorsed from the outset as an aesthetic strategy that fought against the domination and corruption of
aesthetic taste by business interests in the arts, particularly in concert management, music journalism in
the commercial press, and the popularization of the piano as a consumer product indicative of social status
and respectability. After 1918, Modernist composers sought refuge in new organizations, such as the
Schoenberg circle’s Verein für Musikalische Privataufführungen (that barred critics), Cowell and Varèse’s
Pan American Association of Composers, and the Copland and Sessions New York concerts. Modernism
created a demand for new small-scale publishers and journals, leading to the establishment of the Arrow
Press, Dreililien Verlag, New Music Series, Universal Edition, Editions Russes, New Music Quarterly, Modern
Music, and Musikblätter des Anbruchs. The self-conscious sense of an avant-garde and an intentional
isolation from conventional commercial concert life among Modernists (despite the notable advocacy of
Modernist composers by famous performers such as Serge Koussevitzky, Otto Klemperer, Dimitri
Mitropoulos and Leopold Stokowski) helped to widen a rift between popular and concert music that would
plague Modernist composers for most of the 20th century (see Avant garde). Modernism suggested, often
inadvertently, by its unfamiliar procedures and sonorities, a contempt for 20th-century popular music,
and alienated the wider public. It also offended a large segment of the century’s professional performers
on the international concert circuit who declined to perform Modernist music. Intense hostility to most
instrumentalists, singers, and conductors came to characterize many modernist composers throughout
the century, notably Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Roger Sessions, Charles Wuorinen, and Milton Babbitt. In
response, a select cadre of performers chose to link their careers explicitly with the Modernist avant-
garde, including the pianists Eduard Steuermann, David Burge, and Ursula Oppens, the violinists Louis
Krasner, Rudolf Kolisch, Felix Galimir, and Paul Zukofsky, and the flautist Severino Gazzelloni. Performers
specializing in Modernism often worked in small ensembles devoted to propagating Modernism, such as
Speculum Musicae, the Pro Arte Quartet, the La Salle Quartet, and the Kronos Quartet during the second
half of the 20th century.
In contrast to Modernism in painting (e.g., non-objectivism and abstraction from Picasso, Braque,
Kandinsky, and Matisse, to Pollock), sculpture (Brancusi, Giacometti, and David Smith) and architecture
(Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier), Modernism in music failed to gain a secure hold in
the public for music or alter fundamentally the tastes and practices of 20th-century mass culture. Film
music and commercial advertising music did not come to reflect Modernist innovations (with some
exceptions, notably Bernard Herrmann) in the way commercial design and illustration in visual media
eventually appropriated new developments in 20th-century painting and literature; only at the end of the
20th century did Modernism in music, much of it drawn from innovative popular musical idioms, make its
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way into commercial film and television. However, in music as an academic discipline (in terms of theory
and scholarship), and through the revival of Baroque and Classical repertoire, musical Modernism exerted
a wide influence and defined habits and practices.
In painting and literature, early 20th-century Modernism attacked normative claims on behalf of realism
and naturalism. Their counterparts in music were tonality, its link to narrative, and its logical
consequences in the definition of form, such as periods in melodic structure, and thematic development in
sonata form, and the symphony; these practices, rooted in tonality, also dominated the tone poem, even in
the manner practised with great success in the 1880s and 90s by Sibelius and Strauss. Schoenberg’s
Kammersymphonie op.9 (1906), an early Modernist icon, explicitly eschewed repetition, large-scale forces,
tonal stability, and extensive duration. In the early controversies over Modernist innovations, tonality was
construed as the functional equivalent of conventional procedures in the visual arts and literature deemed
objective, and linked to the representation of external reality and nature. Tonality was regarded as the
objective grammar of the representation of life through music. The pre-1914 challenges (by Schoenberg
and Ives) to the uses of tonality and its attendant conventions, and the development of the 12-note method
of composition in the early 1920s, rejected explicitly the means by which the extra-musical had been
represented, signified, and illustrated so effectively and successfully by Wagner and Italian verismo
composers. Atonality and polytonality became hallmarks of Modernism. Modernist music shared with
contemporary radical innovations in the other arts an affinity to new epistemological theories which
questioned the conventional subject–object construct. Theories of relativism, psychoanalysis, the limits of
language, and logical fallibility thrived alongside logical positivism as inspirations to Modernist
experiments. Likewise, the work of Hermann Helmholtz and Ernst Mach on the physics of sound (and
later, Curt Sachs’s work on the taxonomy of sounding objects), the physiology of hearing, and the
psychology of sensation supported the arguments against viewing the logic and conventions of Western
music, especially tonality, as objective and natural. So too did early 20th-century forays into anthropology
that described and highlighted non-Western musical cultures not based on tonality or Western
conventions of tuning intervals. Henry Cowell, Colin McPhee, Walter Kaufmann, and John Foulds
pioneered the inclusion in Western Modernism of non-Western sources, and Toru Takemitsu was a
pioneer in musical modernism’s unique development within Asian cultures.
Nevertheless, narrative possibilities of music were not entirely rejected by the first generation of
Modernists, but the materials and strategies of musical representation underwent drastic change, away
from attempts at direct allusion and correlation to an ‘inward’ relationship and ‘higher’ parallelism
through musical form, as Schoenberg put it. In this regard, the extension of tonality and experimentation
with tonality as an inexhaustible source of the new in music – rather than its outright rejection – also
flourished as a less obvious dimension of Modernism (in the music of Sibelius, Serge Prokoviev, and
Othmar Schoeck, the later output of Sergei Rachmaninoff and Strauss, the work of Heitor Villa-Lobos,
Alberto Ginastera, Silvestre Revueltas, and the complex and unique music of Olivier Messiaen). Even
Schoenberg and Berg retained a residual albeit idiosyncratic allegiance to tonality as compatible with
serialism. Modernism also encouraged the integration of fragments and adaptations from music history,
both in the neo-classicism of the 1920s and later, after 1945, in the work of Luciano Berio (inspired in part
by Mahler) and Alfred Schnittke. Musical Modernism also derived inspiration from poetry (e,g,, Walt
Whitman), drama (e.g., Frank Wedekind), and painting (e.g. Paul Klee). Modernism gained impetus as well
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from early 20th-century mystical enthusiasms and philosophies, such as theosophy, orientalist exoticism,
primitivism, surrealism (Darius Milhaud’s Le Boeuf sur le toit, 1920), symbolism in poetry (Maurice
Maeterlinck, Richard Dehmel, Stephane Mallarmé), and modern dance (the choreography of Grete
Wiesenthal, Martha Graham, Mikhail Fokine, Leonide Massine, and Vaslav Nijinsky). Modernism flirted
with Wagner’s ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk through the medium of set design (the designs by Alfred Roller
for Mahler’s operatic productions in Vienna from 1902 to 1907, the pre-war work of Nicholas Roerich on
Stravinsky’s Rite and Leon Bakst for Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe, 1912, and the sets by Picasso for Satie’s
Parade, 1917, and Diego Rivera’s for Chavez’s Caballos de vapor, 1932). In dramatic works from the early
1900s (e.g., Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle, 1911, Schoenberg’s Die glückliche Hand, 1913, Hindemith’s Sancta
Susanna, 1922, and Berg’s Wozzeck, 1925) one can discern how Modernism reasserted absolutist non-
representational and formalist musical aesthetics as an independent compositional variable within
operatic story telling; a new independent use of music in the context of operatic form was revealed. Roger
Sessions would emulate this in his Modernist opera Montezuma (1963). Schoenberg wrote in 1912: ‘There
are relatively few people who are capable of understanding, purely in terms of music, what music has to
say. The assumption that a piece of music must summon up images of one sort or another, and that if these
are absent the piece of music has not been understood or is worthless, is as widespread as only the false
and banal can be’. It is not surprising therefore that a formalist bias centered on the self-referential logic
of musical materials and sound itself came to dominate Modernist practices after 1920 (as in the case of
the early work of George Antheil and the music of John Cage, Morton Feldman, Sessions, and Elliot Carter)
Modernism was first publicly debated as a distinct historical phenomenon before World War I as a result of
several prominent controversies tied to musical events between 1908 and 1913: the Viennese and Berlin
premières of works by Schoenberg (particularly his Quartet no.2 and Pierrot lunaire), the Paris première of
Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps (at which Debussy was present), and the so-called ‘scandal’ concert of
1913 organized by Schoenberg in Vienna of music by himself, Berg, Webern, Alexander Zemlinsky, and
Mahler. These last two events were so contentious that police intervention was required. One leading
Viennese critic, Ludwig Karpath, claimed that Schoenberg and his disciples were not only destroying music
and violating true standards of beauty and art, they were insulting the audience and explicitly challenging
its competence to judge music. Busoni published his Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst, a defence of
progressive developments in the materials of music and methods of composition in 1907. Schoenberg’s
Harmonielehre (1911) espoused the notions of the ‘emancipation of the dissonance’ and ‘extended tonality’.
Within a year of the end of World War I, a debate over Modernism was well under way, particularly as a
result of Hans Pfitzner’s two blistering pamphlets, Futuristengefahr (1917) and Die neue Ästhetik der
musikalischen Impotenz: ein Verwesungssymptom? (1920). A powerful response on behalf of Modernism,
‘The Musical Impotence of Hans Pfitzner’s Die neue Ästhetik’ was penned by one of Modernism’s greatest
exponents, Schoenberg’s pupil Berg. Pfitzner’s assertion of Modernism as decay forged a permanent link
th
between 20 century politics and musical aesthetics. This debate over Modernism helped define the
direction of modernism for most of the century. Just as the charge that Modernism was a sign of a diseased
culture, it was defended as promoting freedom, individuality, and the resistance to tyranny; the practices
inherited from the 19th century consequently became identified with fascism and dictatorship, even
though Modernist strategies could be found in music favored by Nazism and Stalinism, as evidenced by
works by Orff and Shostakovich. Faced with an initial resistance by the public and the critics, opponents
decried the arrogance and arbitrary radicalism of Modernism’s assertive break with the past and tradition,
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while the innovators defended themselves by an appeal to history and the ethical purposes of art as they
believed they ought to be understood in modernity. Hostility to the public and Modernism’s shocking
surface of sound were, ironically, defended by invoking Wagner (who became a Nazi icon) and his ideology
of progressive change. This did not prevent Modernism from being vulnerable to fascist apologists.
Ironically, the change advocated by Modernists was an anti-Wagnerian return to the principles of pre-
Romantic classical composition that celebrated music’s autonomy. Modernist music opened a way music
might address the unmet spiritual demands of the contemporary moment. The critical appraisal of Brahms
therefore underwent revision; he became a model of musical innovation, a composer who advanced the
inherent potential of purely musical thinking.
6. World War I and its consequences.
World War I was crucial to the development of Modernism. The shock of the devastation and carnage, in
addition to the instability and hardship of the postwar years, deepened the impulse among composers,
particularly in France and Germany, to use art as a vehicle for protest and criticism. The trajectory of pre-
war Modernism seemed vindicated and justified. A radical break and the shedding of the veneer of
objective aesthetic norms and conventions through fundamental musical innovation (e.g., the
abandonment of tonality) and the explicit distortion of traditional expectations emerged as legitimate
responses to the irrationality and cruelty of contemporary existence. Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin (1919,
orchd 1924) and Berg’s Wozzeck (1925), Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1934), and Vaughan
Williams’ Fourth Symphony (1934) were crucial and influential examples. The positive embrace of
technology, as well as the perceived need to abandon old distinctions between music and noise (audible in
the use of string instruments to create percussive and atmospheric sounds, exploited after 1945 by Gyorgy
Ligeti and Witold Lutoslawski) ran parallel with a heightened curiosity about non-Western musical
practices and instruments. Not only the entire 19th century but pre-war Expressionism came under fire,
which in turn fueled post-war neo-classicism. As Schoenberg’s development of the 12-note system of
composition (a strategy experimented with at the same time by J.M. Hauer) after World War I implies,
during the interwar years Modernism and neo-classicism were allied through a common rejection of all
forms of Romanticism. Schoenberg’s reputation as a radical but also an iconoclast conservative was based
on his advocacy of the primacy of counterpoint and his reassessment of Brahms – long considered the
arch-conservative of the 19th century – as a progressive adherent to the 18th-century principle of
developing variation and the autonomy of music.
By 1933 five distinct strands of Modernism had come into being: (i) the Second Viennese School, made up
of Schoenberg and his followers, particularly Berg and Webern, but also Ernst Krenek and Hans Erich
Apostel; (ii) the French-Russian axis, dominated by Stravinsky; (iii) German Expressionism, which began
with Busoni and continued with the young Hindemith and Erwin Schulhoff; (iv) indigenous Modernisms,
characterized by Ives, Cowell, Sessions, and Copland in America, Bartók and Zoltan Kodaly in Hungary,
Szymanowski in Poland, Janáček and Martinů in postwar Czechoslovakia, and Chavez and Revueltas in
Mexico; and (v) experimentalism, characteristic of Alois Hába, Varèse, Henry Cowell, Iannis Xenakis and
John Cage, that led to the exploration of microtonality, the embrace of ambient sound, chance music, and
the machine, and a fascination with non-Western music and technology. These strands often came
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together in the work of particular composers. Many early Modernists, including Stravinsky, Bartók, and
Szymanowski, continued to find, after 1918, radical and modernist possibilities inherent in rural folk and
pre-modern traditions.
Although these five types continued to define Modernism for the remainder of the century, the Viennese
school was of the greatest significance. It inspired a powerful third generation after Berg and Webern,
including the work of Nikos Skalkottas, Egon Wellesz, Krenek, K.A. Hartmann, Roberto Gerhard, Leon
Kirchner, Earl Kim, and Alexander Goehr. The French tradition that began with Debussy, Ravel, and Les Six
continued with Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, and Henri Dutilleux. Particularly important has been the
intersection between national and local traditions and Modernism, as in the cases of Ligeti and György
Kurtag (Hungary), Lutosławski and Grazyna Bacewicz (Poland), Harrison Birtwistle (England), Ginastera
(Argentina), and Lou Harrison and Morton Feldman (USA). The experimental dimension witnessed
particular vitality in the last quarter of the century, especially as a result of advances in technology
(sometimes employed in connection with the postwar extension of serialism and rhythmic fragmentation)
and, in recent years, the influence of rock music. Key figures include Conlon Nancarrow (who generated an
entire repertory using the prepared player piano) and George Crumb (whose theatrical, exotic sound
textures were influential in the 1970s), La Monte Young, Steve Reich and Terry Riley in minimalism, Roger
Reynolds, Pauline Oliveros, and Annea Lockwood in conceptual music, Otto Luening and Vladimir
Ussachevsky, and later Morton Subotnik, Wuorinen, Mario Davidovsky, Richard Teitelbaum, and David
Rosenboom in electronic music (including the use of synthesizers and computers), Nam June Paik in the
synthesis of sound and video, and John Zorn, Frank Zappa, and Anthony Braxton in the connection with
rock and jazz.
7. Between the wars.
The political implications of the debate over Modernism became most significant in the interwar years.
Musical Modernism, seen (not entirely accurately) as disruptive and an ally of progressive and radical left-
wing politics (Webern was, for example, a Nazi sympathizer) was confronted by the conservative, anti-
Modernist compositional aesthetics that had become part of the official doctrine of fascism and Soviet
communism from Stalin on. Nazi ideology (see Nazism) and the Soviet construct of Socialist realism
attacked Modernism as anti-nationalist, unnatural, élitist, degenerate, Jewish, foreign, and subversive.
The leading conservative composers in Germany, Pfitzner and to a lesser extent Strauss (who sought to
craft his own synthesis of Modernist strategies and tonality after 1918), went along with the Nazi regime,
as did most of their talented younger colleagues (e.g. Carl Orff and Werner Egk) who toned down any
evident residual Modernist tendencies. The Russian Modernism of the 1920s and early 30s – the work of
Nikolay Roslavets, Mosolov, Gavril Popov, and the young Shostakovich – was suppressed by 1936. In 1938
Modernism was officially banned and declared ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis (see Entartete Musik). In 1948
Stalin, through the notorious Zhdanov decree, reaffirmed the attitude of the 1930s and once again decried
Modernism as exemplary of bourgeois individualism and empty formalism. The irony in the attack by
Hitler and Stalin was that already by the late 1920s the continuing failure of Modernism to gain a wide
audience had led to defections (in terms of compositional practice) within the Modernist camp by
composers on the political left, notably Hanns Eisler, Marc Blitzstein, and Kurt Weill. Nonetheless, the
close link between fascism and totalitarianism and a reactionary musical aesthetic, as well as the intense
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ideological campaign against it, lent Modernism a unique prestige and visibility in the late 1930s that
continued into the postwar era. Modernism’s critical prestige after 1945 on account of opposition to it by
Hitler and Stalin stood in marked contrast to its persistent lack of success with the public.
8. World War II and after.
In part as a result of the political significance and ethical overtones associated with 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, including the use of indeterminacy (inspired largely by Cage) thrived. In
this context T.W. Adorno (who studied with Berg and Steuermann) emerged as the most influential
postwar theoretical advocate of Modernism in music. Adorno focused 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 (often tied to the influence of industrial capitalism) 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 music as an 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 a progressive 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 – not only came to define the legacy of Viennese Modernism (initially, at the turn of the
century, largely a provincial conceit) but became emblematic of musical Modernism per se. Even Stravinsky
and Aaron Copland were motivated in the 1950s and 60s to employ serial techniques in their late music.
The French-Russian trajectory of early Modernism had also evolved after 1945 into a new phase for neo-
classicism encouraged by the teaching of Nadia Boulanger. Under Messiaen’s influence Modernism also
sustained a distinct presence in postwar France (including the work of Xenakis). The German Expressionist
tradition continued with Hans Werner Henze and K.A. Hartmann but post war German Modernism was
itself influenced by the legacy of the Schoenberg school. The overwhelming majority of postwar German,
Italian, and French Modernists, including Luigi Dallapiccola, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Boulez, Bruno
Maderna, Henri Pousseur, Luigi Nono, and Berio and the many participants in the most influential
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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. Even Cage studied with Schoenberg. Experimentalism, conceptualism, and radical
minimalism flourished (e.g., the music of Harrison, Harry Partch, Henry Brant, and Reich). Cowell and
above all John Cage became influential as composers and theoreticians. Modernism encompassed
electronic music, adaptations of non-Western music (e.g. in the music of McPhee), new forms of notation,
and chance music. The work of Sessions, Ligeti, and Carter reflected a brilliant synthesis of indigenous
impulses and international Modernist strategies that resulted in novel sonorities and uses of time. The
postwar music of Stockhausen and Xenakis mirrored the integration of technology and modern
mathematics and scientific theory with earlier Modernist strategies. In America, Perspectives of New Music
became a leading postwar academic journal of advocacy for Modernism.
9. The late 20th century.
The populism evident in the political radicalism of the 1960s in Europe and America shattered the
inherited mid-century linkage of Modernism and progressive politics. As the political overtones of
pre-1945 and 20th-century Modernism receded into memory, rock, jazz, and commercial folk music
assumed music’s oppositional and political significance in both western and eastern Europe. The moral
edge of Modernism weakened, leaving composers free to become more eclectic. Modernism, defined as an
historical phenomenon of the 20th century, lost its ethical and aesthetic prestige. Its status at the end of
the century stood in stark contrast to the expectations generated after both world wars. From the
mid-1920s, Modernism was widely accepted as the defining aspect of 20th-century music and the
century’s dominant musical signature. The legitimacy of its aesthetics and the significance of its genesis
provided the foundation for the standard historical paradigm and narrative concerning 20th-century
music. For example, the music of Strauss between 1912 and 1949 which retained tonality was, despite its
striking innovations, committed to a formal and expressive heritage that included both Wagner and
Mozart. It was, as Adorno argued, a vestigial phenomenon out of step with history. However, this judgment
would change, since from the mid-1970s Modernism was in retreat and pluralism, including a return to
conventional tonal usage, came to characterize the evolution of late 20th-century concert music. Insofar
as Modernism survived its demise after the end of the Cold War, it flourished in collaboration with the
innovations and practices of popular idioms, such as rock, hip-hop, and rap music. A widespread concern
for the health and survival of high art concert music in Europe and North America during the last decades
of the century only helped diminish the interest in historical Modernism. The emergence of
postmodernism and neo-romanticism in the last quarter of the century restored tonality as central to
contemporary music and forced a revision of the accepted historical account. So-called conservative 20th-
century music, once dismissed as secondary and irrelevant in the immediate post-World-War-II climate
of opinion shaped by the views of Schoenberg, Adorno, Rene Leibowitz, Babbitt, and Boulez, began to
return to the repertory and receive serious critical assessment. Strauss, Copland, Barber, Sibelius, Vaughan
Williams, Rachmaninoff, Korngold, Britten, Shostakovich, and the unjustly ignored composers who were
victims of fascism (for example Schreker, Ullmann, Gideon Klein, Walter Braunfels, Mieczyslaw Weinberg,
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and Ernst Toch) increasingly appeared central to any musical characterization of the 20th century.
Modernism may end up as only one of many competing 20th-century trends and not the century’s
dominant musical voice. However, even if Modernism and its repertory end up at the periphery, it has
consistently framed the debate about the nature and future of high art musical composition in the
contemporary world.
Musical Modernism’s failure vis-à-vis Modernism in the other arts to gain wide acceptance (which has
frequently been held responsible for the relative decline in the significance of all concert music since the
last third of the 20th century) can be linked to the dramatic shifts in musical culture resulting from
technological advances. The 20th century witnessed the explosion of novel forms of sound reproduction
and distribution and the creation of a mass market for recorded sound. A premium on familiarity and ease
of listening took hold as a decline in older forms of music education, including amateurism, escalated. The
piano was replaced by the radio and gramophone and subsequently, the computer and the smartphone as
the central instruments of musical culture. The beneficiary of this was not Modernism, which depended on
the capacity to follow sound, pitch changes, and complex textures, but anti-Modernist popular and concert
music, ranging from the musical to the hit song, film music, and operas written in accessible styles. Rock
and popular music’s dominance favoured the rediscovery of the 20th century’s conservative tradition of
musical composition. The unexpected prestige of Leonard Bernstein’s music in the early 21st century is a
case in point. Even the early defections from Modernism by prominent composers were often based on the
very political grounds that were invoked on behalf of Modernism. Copland, like Weill and Eisler, cited his
progressive political commitments when he turned away from Modernism in the 1930s; he realized the gap
between Modernism and the mass audience. After the 1960s, George Rochberg, Philip Glass, David del
Tredici, and Krzysztof Penderecki abandoned Modernism on account of its inability to reach a significant
public. Although by the end of the century modernism was in retreat, it continued in the work of American
and European composers, particularly under the aegis of Boulez and IRCAM in Paris. Modernism’s range at
the end of the century stretched from the conceptual music of Oliveros to the brilliant and original
experimental synthesis of Chinese and Western modernism in the music of Tan Dun and Bright Sheng.
Notable later 20th-century exponents of modernism include Stefan Wolpe, Josef Tal, George Benjamin,
Jacob Druckman, Brian Ferneyhough, George Perle, Wolfgang Rihm, Richard Wernick, Richard Wilson, and
Ralph Shapey. From the perspective of the first quarter of the 21st century, it is too soon to discount the
appeal and influence of 20th-century Modernism.
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H. Cowell, ed.: American Composers on American Music (Palo Alto, CA, 1933)
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W. Reich, ed.: Alban Berg: mit Bergs eigenen Schriften und Beiträgen von Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno und Ernst Krenek
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Biography)
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J. Häusler: Musik im 20. Jahrhundert: von Schönberg zu Penderecki (Bremen, 1969)
N. Rossi and R.A. Choate: Music of our Time (Boston, 1969)
J. Peyser: 20th Century Music: the Sense behind the Sound (New York, 1970)
C. Debussy: Monsieur Croche et autres écrits (Paris, 1971; Eng. trans., 1976)
H. Vogt: Neue Musik seit 1945 (Stuttgart, 1972, 2/1982)
M. Cooper, ed.: The Modern Age 1890–1960, NOHM, 10 (London, 1974)
M. Nyman: Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (London, 1974)
S. Reich: Writings about Music (New York, 1974)
H.H. Stuckenschmidt: Schoenberg: Leben, Umwelt, Werk (Zürich, 1974; Eng. trans., 1977)
J. Vinton, ed.: Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Music (London, 1974)
B. Bartók: ‘Harvard Lectures’ (1943), ‘Bela Bartók's Opinion on the Technical, Aesthetic and Spiritual Orientation of
Contemporary Music’ (1938), Bartók’s Essays, ed. B. Suchoff (London, 1976)
R. Smith Brindle: The New Music (London, 1975, 2/1987)
J. Samson: Music in Transition: a Study of Tonal Expansion and Atonality 1900–1920 (London, 1977)
M. Schmidt: Brennpunkte der Neuen Musik (Cologne, 1977)
A. Whittall: Music since the First World War (London, 1977)
C. Dahlhaus: Schönberg und andere: gesammelte Aufsätze zur neuen Musik (Mainz and London, 1978; Eng. trans., 1987,
as Schoenberg and the New Music: Essays)
O. Kolleritsch, ed.: Adorno und die Musik (Graz, 1979)
S. Lipman: Music after Modernism (New York, 1979)

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H. and R. Moldenhauer: Anton von Webern (New York, 1979)
R. Sessions: On Music: Collected Essays, ed. E.T. Cone (Princeton, NJ, 1979)
P. Boulez: Points de repère (Paris, 1981; Eng. trans., 1986, as Orientations)
R. Court: Adorno et la nouvelle musique: art et modernité (Paris, 1981)
C. Dahlhaus: Musikalischer Realismus: zur Musikgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1982)
C. Dahlhaus, ed.: Die Wiener Schule heute: neun Beiträge (Mainz, and New York, 1983)
P. Griffiths: György Ligeti (London, 1983)
P. Griffiths: Ligeti in Conversation (London, 1983)
J. Lopez: La musica en la modernidad: de Beethoven a Xenakis (Barcelona, 1983)
W. Mertens: American Minimal Music (London, 1983)
R.P. Morgan: ‘Secret Languages: the Roots of Musical Modernism’, Critical Inquiry, 10 (1983–4), 442–61; repr. in
Modernism: Challenges and Perspectives, ed. M. Chefdor and others (Urbana, IL, 1986), 33–53
M. Deppermann: ‘Russland um 1900: Reichtum und Krise einer Epoche im Umbruch’, Musik-Konzepte, 37–38 (1984),
61–106
G. Rochberg: The Aesthetics of Survival: a Composer’s View of Twentieth-Century Music (Ann Arbor, 1984)
J. Rockwell: All American Music: Composition in the Late Twentieth Century (New York 1984)
N. Brunet: ‘Musique germanique et modernisme en France à l'aube du XXe siècle’, Revue international de musique
française, no.18 (1985), 47–57
J. Habermas: Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (Frankfurt, 1985)
D. Matore: ‘Le modernisme musical français à fin de la Seconde Guerre Mondial’, Revue international de musique
française, no.18 (1985), 69–78
P. Griffiths: The Thames and Hudson Encyclopaedia of 20th-Century Music (London, 1986)
M. Babbitt: Words about Music (Madison, WI, 1987)
U. Dibelius: Moderne Musik II: 1965–1985 (Munich, 1988); rev. in Moderne Musik nach 1945, 1998)
V. Kalisch: Entwurf einer Wissenschaft der Musik: Guido Adler (Baden-Baden, 1988)
G. Scholz, ed.: Dodekaphonie in Österreich nach 1945 (Vienna, 1988)
N. Slonimsky: Supplement to Music since 1900 (New York, 1988)
T. Johnson: The Voice of New Music: New York City 1972–1982 (Eindhoven, 1989)
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R. Kostelanetz: On Innovative Music(ians) (New York, 1989)
P. Boulez and J. Cage: Correspondance et documents (Winterthur, 1990; Eng. trans., 1993, as The Boulez-Cage
Correspondence)
E. Haimo: Schoenberg’s Serial Odyssey: the Evolution of his Twelve-Tone Method, 1914–1928 (Oxford, 1990)
M. Sichardt: Die Entstehung der Zwölftonmethode Arnold Schönbergs (Mainz and New York, 1990)
J.N. Straus: Remaking the Past: Musical Modernism and the Influence of the Tonal Tradition (Cambridge, MA, 1990)
R.P. Morgan: Twentieth-Century Music (New York, 1991)
J.N. Straus: ‘The “Anxiety of Influence” in Twentieth-Century Music’, JM, 9 (1991), 430–47
E. Antokoletz: Twentieth-Century Music (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1992)
M. Brown: ‘Origins of Modernism: Musical Structures and Narrative Forms’, Music and Text: Critical Inquiries, ed. S.P.
Scher (Cambridge, 1992), 75–92
B. Morton and P. Collins: Contemporary Composers (Chicago, 1992)
G. Borio: Musikalische Avantgarde um 1960 (Laaber, 1993)
J.-Y. Bosseur: Révolutions musicales: la musique contemporaine depuis 1945 (Paris, 1993)
E. Budde: ‘Der Pluralismus der Moderne und/oder die Postmoderne’, Wiederaneignung und Neubestimmung: der Fall
‘Postmodern’ in der Musik, ed. O. Kolleritsch (Vienna, 1993), 50–62
J. and D. Crawford: Expressionism in Twentieth-Century Music (Bloomington, IN, 1993)
M. Delaere: Funktionelle Atonalität: analytische Strategien für die frei-atonale Musik der Wiener Schule (Wilhelmshaven,
1993)
A. Ferenc: Investigating Russian Musical Modernism: Nikolai Roslavets and his New System of Tone Organization (diss.,
U. of Michigan, 1993)
W. Frisch: The Early Works of Arnold Schoenberg, 1893–1908 (Berkeley, 1993)
M. Hansen: Arnold Schoenberg: ein Konzept der Moderne (Kassel, 1993)
D.J. Lambourn: Modernism in British Music, 1900–1922 (Cambridge, 1993)
D. Metzer: The Ascendancy of Musical Modernism in New York, 1915–1929 (diss., Yale U., 1993)
S. Miller, ed.: The Last Post: Music after Modernism (Manchester, 1993)
M. Paddison: Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge, 1993)
P.D. Roberts: Modernism in Russian Piano Music: Skriabin, Prokofiev, and their Russian Contemporaries (Bloomington,
IN, 1993)
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E. Schwartz and D. Godfrey: Music since 1945 (New York, 1993)
E. Strickland: Minimalism: Origins (Bloomington, IN, 1993)
T.B. Ewell: At the Vanguard of Russian Musical Modernism: Nikolai Andreevich Roslavets (diss., U. of Washington, 1994)
O. Kolleritsch: Klischee und Wirklichkeit in der musikalischen Moderne (Vienna, 1994)
C. Becker, ed.: Schüler der Wiener Schule (Vienna, 1995)
G. Born: Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalisation of the Avant-Garde (Berkeley, 1995)
P. Griffiths: Modern Music and After: Directions since 1945 (Oxford, 1995)
D.E. Schneider: ‘Bartók and Stravinsky: Respect, Competition, Influence, and the Hungarian Reaction to Modernism in
the 1920s’, Bartók and his World, ed. P. Laki (Princeton, NJ, 1995), 172–99
M. Paddison: Adorno, Modernism, and Mass Culture: Essays on Critical Theory and Music (London, 1996)
K. Gann: American Music in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1997)
L.H. Hakopian: Music of the Soviet Age 1917–1987 (Stockholm, 1998)
J.N. Straus: ‘The Myth of Serial “Tyranny” in the 1950s and 1960s’, MQ, 83/3, (1999), 301–43
A. Whittall: Musical Composition in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1999)
D. Albright: Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts (Chicago, 2000)
A. Whittall: Exploring Twentieth-Century Music: Tradition and Innovation (Cambridge, 2003)
D. Albright: Modernism and Music: an Anthology of Sources (Chicago, 2004)
A. Ashby, ed: The Pleasure of Modernist Music: Listening, Meaning, Intention, Ideology (Rochester, 2004)
B. Heile, Björn: ‘Darmstadt as Other: British and American Responses to Musical Modernism’, Twentieth-Century Music,
1/2 (2004), 161–78
E. Levi: ‘The Censorship of Musical Modernism in Germany, 1918–1945’, Critical Studies: Censorship & Cultural
Regulation in the Modern Age, 22 (2004), 61–83
A. Williams: ‘Ageing of the New: the Museum of Musical Modernism’, The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music,
ed. N. Cook (Cambridge, 2004), 506–38
K. Berger and A. Newcomb: Music and the Aesthetics of Modernity (Cambridge, 2005)
S. Bick: ‘Of Mice and Men: Copland, Hollywood, and American Musical Modernism’, American Music, 23, no.4 (2005),
426–72
W. Frisch: German Modernism: Music and the Arts, iii (Berkeley and Los Angeles 2005)
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C.D. Youmans: Richard Strauss’s Orchestral Music and the German Intellectual Tradition: the Philosophical Roots of
Musical Modernism (Bloomington, 2005)
E.M. Hisama: Gendering Musical Modernism: the Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon (Cambridge,
2006)
K. Berger: Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow: an Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity (Berkeley, 2007)
A. Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York, 2007)
D. Metzer: Musical Modernism at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, 2009)
S. Downes: Music and Decadence in European Modernism: the Case of Central and Eastern Europe (Cambridge and New
York, 2010)
M. Riley: British Music and Modernism, 1895–1960 (London, 2010)
B. Earle: Luigi Dallapiccola and Musical Modernism in Fascist Italy (Cambridge and New York, 2013)
E. Antokoletz: A History of Twentieth-Century Music in a Theoretic-Analytical Context (New York, 2014)
C. Ballantine: ‘Modernism and Popular Music’, JRMA, 139/1 (2014), 200–204
C. Chowrimootoo: ‘Reviving the Middlebrow, or Deconstructing Modernism from the Inside’, JRMA, 139/1 (2014), 187–
93
J.S. Walden: Sounding Authentic: the Rural Miniature and Musical Modernism (Oxford, 2014)
A. Williams: ‘Post-War Modernism: Exclusions and Expansions’, JRMA, 139/1 (2014), 193–7
S. Collins: ‘The Composer as “Good European”: Musical Modernism, Amor Fati and the Cosmopolitanism of Frederick
Delius’, Twentieth-Century Music, 12/1 (2015), 97–123
E. Guldbrandsen, and J. Johnson, eds: Transformations of Musical Modernism: Music Since 1900 (Cambridge 2015)
A. Kieffer: ‘The Debussyist Ear: Listening, Representation, and French Musical Modernism’, 19CM, 39/1 (2015), 56–79
K.J. Maynard: ‘Wagner’s “Tannhäuser”, Manet’s “Tuileries”, and the Birth of Modernism’, ML, 96/4 (2015), 630–38
C. Chowrimootoo: ‘“Britten Minor”: Constructing the Modernist Canon’, Twentieth-Century Music, 13/2 (2016), 261–90
S. Brodsky: From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious (Oakland, 2017)
A. Moody: The Art of Hunger: Aesthetic Autonomy and the Afterlives of Modernism (Oxford, 2018)
S. Collins: Lateness and Modernism: Untimely Ideas about Music, Literature and Politics in Interwar Britain (Cambridge,
2019)
B. Heile and C. Wilson, eds.: The Routledge Research Companion to Modernism in Music (London, 2019)
A. Moody and S.J. Ross, eds.: Global Modernists on Modernism: an Anthology (London, 2020)
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See also
Avant garde
Conducting, §2: History since 1820
Cowell, Henry
Crawford, Ruth
Denmark, §I: Art music: 20th century
Finland, §I, 5: Art music: Between the wars
Instrumentation and orchestration, §5: Impressionism and later developments
Sweden, §I, 5: Art music: From 1890
Liszt, Franz, §25: The music of Liszt’s old age
Minimalism
Musorgsky, Modest Petrovich, §7: Posthumous completion of works
Popular music, §I, 4(iv): Europe & North America: Genre, form, style
Ravel, Maurice, §5: Style
Ukraine, §I, 4: 20th century art music
Russia, 1917–33
Schat, Peter
Shostakovich, Dmitry, §2(ii): 1926–36., i) Works.
Villa-Lobos, Heitor, §2: The ‘week of modern art’ and Paris
Expressionism
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Modernism

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Subscriber: California State University Fullerton; date: 30 January 2024

Subscriber: California State University Fullerton; date: 30 January 2024

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Subscriber: California State University Fullerton; date: 30 January 2024

Subscriber: California State University Fullerton; date: 30 January 2024

Subscriber: California State University Fullerton; date: 30 January 2024

Subscriber: California State University Fullerton; date: 30 January 2024

Subscriber: California State University Fullerton; date: 30 January 2024

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5. Social and cultural aspects.

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6. World War I and its consequences.

Subscriber: California State University Fullerton; date: 30 January 2024

7. Between the wars.

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8. World War II and after.

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9. The late 20th century.

Subscriber: California State University Fullerton; date: 30 January 2024

P. Moos: Moderne Musikästhetik in Deutschland (Leipzig, 1902)

A. Schoenberg: Harmonielehre (Leipzig and Vienna, 1911; Eng. trans., 1978)

Subscriber: California State University Fullerton; date: 30 January 2024

N. Slonimsky: Music since 1900 (New York, 1937, 4/1971)

I. Stravinsky: Poétique musicale (Cambridge, MA, 1947; Eng. trans., 1947)

A. Schoenberg: Style and Idea (New York, 1950, 2/1975)

H.H. Stuckenschmidt: Neue Musik (Berlin, 1951)

H. Hartog, ed: European Music in the Twentieth Century (London, 1957)

R. Stephan: Neue Musik (Göttingen, 1958)

J. Cage: Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT, 1961)

P.H. Lang, ed.: Problems of Modern Music (New York, 1962)

G. Perle: Serial Composition and Atonality (London, 1962)

J. Roy: Présences contemporaines: musique française (Paris, 1962)

D. Mitchell: The Language of Modern Music (London, 1963)

Subscriber: California State University Fullerton; date: 30 January 2024

W. Mellers: Caliban Reborn (New York, 1967)

J. Cage: Notations (New York, 1969)

J. Häusler: Musik im 20. Jahrhundert: von Schönberg zu Penderecki (Bremen, 1969)

N. Rossi and R.A. Choate: Music of our Time (Boston, 1969)

H. Vogt: Neue Musik seit 1945 (Stuttgart, 1972, 2/1982)

M. Cooper, ed.: The Modern Age 1890–1960, NOHM, 10 (London, 1974)

M. Nyman: Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (London, 1974)

S. Reich: Writings about Music (New York, 1974)

J. Vinton, ed.: Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Music (London, 1974)

R. Smith Brindle: The New Music (London, 1975, 2/1987)

M. Schmidt: Brennpunkte der Neuen Musik (Cologne, 1977)

A. Whittall: Music since the First World War (London, 1977)

O. Kolleritsch, ed.: Adorno und die Musik (Graz, 1979)

S. Lipman: Music after Modernism (New York, 1979)

Subscriber: California State University Fullerton; date: 30 January 2024

H. and R. Moldenhauer: Anton von Webern (New York, 1979)

P. Boulez: Points de repère (Paris, 1981; Eng. trans., 1986, as Orientations)

R. Court: Adorno et la nouvelle musique: art et modernité (Paris, 1981)

P. Griffiths: György Ligeti (London, 1983)

P. Griffiths: Ligeti in Conversation (London, 1983)

J. Lopez: La musica en la modernidad: de Beethoven a Xenakis (Barcelona, 1983)

W. Mertens: American Minimal Music (London, 1983)

J. Habermas: Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (Frankfurt, 1985)

M. Babbitt: Words about Music (Madison, WI, 1987)