Page 254 - ESSENTIAL LISTENING TO MUSIC

WATCH...afilmonCubismas four-dimensional art, online.
Figure 15.4
One of the first statements of Cubist art, Picasso’s Les Demoi- selles d’Avignon (1907). The la- dies of the evening are depicted by means of geometric shapes on a flat, two-dimensional plane. Like much avant-garde music of the time, Cubist paintings reject the emotionalism and decorative appeal of nineteenth-century art. The painting was so radical that Picasso refused to exhibit it for nearly a decade.
one think of love and beauty in the face of wholesale destruction? For writers, painters, and composers alike, disjunction, anxiety, and even hysteria became valid artistic sentiments that reflected the realities of the day. The epicenter of this upheaval was, again, France and Germany.
As early as 1870, the two countries had fought what we now call the Franco- Prussian War, and tensions simmered ominously throughout the decades that followed. Developments in the arts mirrored the unsettled times, and compos- ers across Europe began to turn against conventional musical expression. In fin-de-siècle (end-of-nineteenth-century) Paris, we’ve seen how the Impression- ists, led by Debussy, mounted a quietly sensual protest against the extremes of German Romanticism. Shortly thereafter, Modernism—in the hands of the revo- lutionary Russian expatriate Igor Stravinsky—arrived in Paris with full force. In the German-speaking lands, the Expressionists, including Arnold Schoenberg, staged the most disruptive revolt of all against tonality and tradition, conveying their anxiety through radical dissonance. With Modernism, shock began to re- place beauty as the defining component of musical art.
Not all listeners were pleased with this Modernist approach. Schoenberg’s early experiments with dissonance were received at first with hoots from a hos- tile public in Vienna in 1913; that same year Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) caused a riot at its Parisian premiere. But Modernist artists like Stein, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg were determined to issue the public a wakeup call, to yank it away from Romantic idealism and back to harsh reality. So, too, were the painters.
Modernist Painting and Music: The Rejection of Representational Art
Photography was invented in France around 1830 and by the end of the nineteenth century, photographic im- ages had become commonplace. Perhaps there was a connection between the appearance of a machine that could duplicate the visual world exactly and the sud- den disinclination of painters to do so. Whatever the cause, representational art began to disappear, pushed aside first by Impressionism and then by a more radi- cal new style emanating from Paris in the early 1900s called Cubism. In a Cubist painting, the artist fractures and dislocates formal reality into geometrical blocks and planes, as in the famous Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (Figure 15.4), created in 1907 by Pablo Picasso (1881– 1973), where the female form has been recast into an- gular, interlocking shapes. In Germany, Austria, and Scandinavia, a different, yet equally radical style of art—Expressionism—developed around this time. The aim of Expressionism was not to depict objects as the eye seems them but to express the strong emotion
232 chapter fifteen european impressionism and modernism
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