Theoretically Speaking S5:E14: What Makes Modernism Modernism ?

This is where things start getting weird.

Yes, I know we’ve covered some pretty weird stuff in the previous 50 episodes of the “What Makes…” series.

But let’s look at what happens when centuries of structures and forms and rules are tossed out the window. Let’s watch artists end a genre by taking divergent paths.

We know that genres often splinter into new ones.

There are myriad varieties of Heavy Metal, Electronic Music, and Blues. Last week, we speculated how Hyperpop might evolve into different styles. 

In the classical music world, however, the timeline had been more or less straight.

Each bent the rules of its predecessor because composers thought they’d done everything they could do under those rules. When people felt Romanticism had run its course and it was time to bend the rules, they didn’t just bend them. They broke the rules beyond recognition.

We call it Modernism, because it fragmented so much, that the biggest thing the styles had in common was that they were modern.

Composers thought Romanticism couldn’t truly express how the world was changing.

Think about what happened around that time. There were terrible things: 

On the more positive side, there were great advances:

But what really started things off was: The camera.

Before film photography, if someone wanted a picture of themselves or a family member or a landscape, they’d have to hire a painter. Some journeymen painters made their living doing portraits of rich people. All that came to an end with the camera.

That left a lot of painters out of work, but it freed them, or some of them anyway, to experiment with what they could do with paints and brushes.

Musicians wanted in on the fun. Composers took the idea of portraying an impression of a subject musically. Impressionism, as a style of music, was born. 

I’m simplifying here. Just go with it.

As painting got more abstract, so did music.

Gone are the rules of forms and structures and conventions.

Modernism didn’t just break Romanticism’s rules. It rejected them. Their mindset isn’t that different from the Hyperpop artists we covered last week. Both eras want to push the extremes of music as far as they could.

With no rules, composers could do anything they wanted. So they did.

Some went bigger, some went smaller, some incorporated folk music, some used multiple time signatures. 

We call all the classical music from the first half of the 20th Century “Modernism.” Seems simple enough, but it’s really made up of various new subgenres that shared few traits other than the time period.

Some of the ideas they shared include irregular meters and atonality. However, different schools of thought developed simultaneously. The major subgenres of Modernism included: 

• Impressionism
• Expressionism 
• Primitivism
• and Neoclassicism. 

Impressionism is a direct offshoot of Romanticism. It started in France, where Monet was from, not so coincidentally.

How did it give those impressions? Primarily through timbre and chord choices. “Timbre” is the way an instrument sounds.

Impressionism also embraces non-functional harmony. Functional harmony is when each chord has a relationship to a tonal center. If a piece is in the key of C major, the tonal center is C. It feels like home. Some chords feel close to C, others feel distant or tense, and their function is based on that distance or tension. The piece only feels finished when it gets back to C.

In non-functional harmony, there is no tonal center, so we call it atonal.

And if one chord starts before the previous one ends, something that wouldn’t happen in the Romantic period or earlier, that only adds new colors. The ambiguity of overlapping chords is intentional.

Impressionism wasn’t even married to strict time signatures. If the composer thought a measure of five beats would do a better job portraying his ideas than a measure of four, that’s what he’d write.

And maybe he’d follow it with a measure of nine or two or something else before going back to four, if it went back at all.

Where Impressionism was ephemeral, Expressionism was intense, powerful, and harsh, and it was all those things to better express emotions. Its composers drew ideas from Freud and others about various psychological states, and its subjects could be disturbing.

Melodies are often described as “angular,” meaning they don’t flow from note to nearby note. Instead they take sharp corners, leaping from note to faraway note with nothing in-between. There may or may not be any consistent rhythm.

Primitivism dove deep into Romanticism’s use of folk songs. It often used non-Western scales and harmonies, and could therefore be a little atonal. Its composers embraced “primitive” indigenous cultures as a way of breaking from musical and societal conventions, and to look for something wild and exotic. 

So far, these styles share a rejection of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s “Treatise on Harmony,” which we talked about in the Classical article. However, another school of thought was Neoclassicism. It looked back, past Romanticism, to the Classical and Baroque periods for inspiration, and kept Rameau’s ideas.

Neoclassicists used earlier forms, like Sonatas and Rondos, and smaller ensembles with an emphasis on wind instruments.

Keep in mind: these four main subgenres aren’t mutually exclusive.

Also, each had a matching movement in the visual arts.

It’s always been that way, with music about 20 years behind.

Have you noticed I haven’t mentioned any Modernist composers by name?

That’s because the lines between these subgenres are blurry and composers mixed and matched these ideas into their own creations. 

The Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, for example, had a long varied career with different phases.

Igor Stravinsky dabbled in all the subgenres, sometimes in the same piece. His music, and Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography, for the ballet The Rite Of Spring were so far removed from what people were familiar with that arguments and fisticuffs broke out in the audience at its premier in 1913. It’s been called a riot, but that’s probably an exaggeration.

Another work that caused physical violence is Ballet Mécanique by American George Antheil. He originally wrote it for a movie by cubist painter Fernand Léger and director Dudley Murphy, however Antheil worked separately and apparently didn’t talk it through with the others.

The music was much longer than the movie, so the movie premiered without a soundtrack. When Antheil debuted his work as a standalone musical piece in 1924, some audience members shouted their disapproval.

Many people liked the work and their arguments with the naysayers led to some brawls outside the theater.

Claude Debussy is closely aligned with Impressionism but he didn’t like the name. He objected to being limited by a label.

He liked the whole tone scale, which has no half steps. All its notes are two piano keys apart, which means it has six notes. Also, since there are only twelve notes, there can only be two whole tone scales because you can start on any note, go up by whole steps, and end up on the same note.

So the notes of the two scales are E, F#, G#, A#, C, D and F, G, A, B, D♭, E♭ .

Since the same six notes are the same interval from each other, none can be the tonal center. It has an open, floaty feel to it. Perfect for setting up an aural dream sequence.

Josef Matthias Hauer and Arnold Schoenberg, independently from each other, developed twelve-tone technique, AKA dodecaphony.

Like the whole tone scale, the twelve-tone technique guarantees that the piece has no tonal center. It doesn’t have a key. It’s atonality taken to its logical extreme. 

Hauer, Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, and others used this technique. It’s a new rule they imposed on themselves.

Despite the rejection of tradition as limiting, some composers limited themselves to their own new rules. I guess learning to work without a framework takes time.

The genre that came after Modernism did a better job of creating without a net.

We’ll talk about it next week.

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