Page 253 - ESSENTIAL LISTENING TO MUSIC

Modernism: An Anti-Romantic Movement
The evolution of musical style is a constant “yin and yang” driven by changing pub- lic tastes. Creativity (the new) challenges the status quo (the old), and ultimately a synthesis results, which, over time, becomes the new status quo. In the late Middle Ages, a musical style emerged that contemporaries called the Ars nova (New Art), which they then contrasted with the previous Ars antiqua (Old Art). At the begin- ning of the Baroque era (around 1600), music theorists juxtaposed the new music of the day, which they called Stile moderno, with the previous one, dubbed Stile antico. So, too, at the turn of the twentieth century, progressive artists—musicians, painters, poets, and writers—created a style called Modernism, against which ultimately a push-back came in the form of Postmodernism. But while previous stylistic changes had been more evolutionary than revolutionary, Modernism was indeed a shockingly radical departure—to many people, simply outrageous. Below is a Modernist verse by American poet Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) describing a piano in Tender Buttons (1914). Can you make sense of it?
A PIANO.
If the speed is open, if the color is careless, if the selection of a strong scent is not awkward, if the button holder is held by all the waving color and there is no color, not any color.
Stein, a mentor to painter Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and novelists F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) and Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), was an early pro- moter of Modernism, a style easy to recognize but difficult to define. Simply put, Modernism was a movement in the arts between 1900 and 1945 that promoted a bracing, progressive style antithetical to the traditional values of Romanticism.
Today Modernist art is no longer “modern” in a chronological sense; some of it is now more than a hundred years old. But if “modern” means a radical de- parture from traditional values, then this description remains apt. It still shocks us more intensely than does the more recent art of the Postmodernist period (1945–present). As we just saw, Modernism took the usual requirements for a poem—that it make sense as narrative or image, and possess proper grammar and syntax—and turned them upside down. So, too, with Modernist music, the concertgoer’s expectations for what makes a good melody, pleasing harmony, and regular meter were confounded. Listeners of the early twentieth century were just as baffled by the Modernist sounds of Stravinsky and Schoenberg as they were by the poetry of Gertrude Stein quoted above.
But why did such a radically different kind of expression emerge shortly af- ter 1900? In part because of a violent social disruption that shook Europe and (to a far lesser degree) North America: the run-up to, and outbreak of, World War I. For the Western world, the first two decades of the twentieth century consti- tuted a social earthquake of the highest magnitude. World War I (1914–1918) left 9 million soldiers dead on the battlefields—27,000 French infantry in a single day on a single field. Shocked by the carnage, intellectuals turned away from the predominantly idealistic, sentimental aesthetics of Romanticism—how could
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