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that these objects generated in the artist. A memorable example is Edvard Munch’s The Scream (Figure 15.5), which features in clash- ing colors and distorted shapes a subject crying out to an unsym- pathetic world.
Modernist painters and musicians were heading in the same direction, not by coincidence, but in a real and personal way. Picas- so and Stravinsky socialized in Paris and sometimes collaborated on theater works. And Schoenberg, himself a talented painter (see Figure 15.11), exhibited his art with an Expressionist group based in Munich, Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), whose members so dis- torted formal reality that objects in their paintings were sometimes barely recognizable.
Melody: More Angularity and Chromaticism
Just as the conventional figure vanished from avant-garde painting
(see Picasso and Munch), so, too, the traditional (singable) melody disappeared from early Modernist music. Indeed, there are very few themes in twentieth-century music that the listener goes away humming. If Romantic melody is generally smooth and conjunct in motion (moving more by steps than by leaps), early-twentieth-century melody tends to be fragmented and angular, like a Cubist painting. The young avant-garde composers went to great lengths to avoid writing conjunct, stepwise lines. Rather than moving up a half step from C to D♭, for example, they were inclined to jump down a major seventh to the D♭ an octave below. Avoiding a simple interval for an agonizingly distant one an octave above or below is called octave displacement; it is a feature of Modernist music.
So, too, is the heavy use of chromaticism, something that developed with Richard Wagner at the end of the nineteenth century. In a fully chromatic scale, all the pitches are an equal distance (half step) apart, and therefore none stands out as the home pitch. In Example 15.2, by Arnold Schoenberg, notice how the melody makes large leaps where it might more easily move by steps and also how several sharps and flats are introduced to produce a highly chromatic line. Octave displacement obscures the tune; chromaticism obscures the tonic.
Figure 15.5
The Scream (1893), by Edvard Munch, sold at Sotheby’s in New York in March 2012 for $119.9 mil- lion, then the highest amount ever paid at auction for a painting.
WATCH . . . a sequence of early Expressionist paintings by Edvard Munch accompanied by a dissonant, chromatic string quartet of Arnold Schoenberg, online.
LiSTeN TO . . . Example 15.2 online.
Example 15.2 > octave displacement and chromaticism
œ #œ#œ#œ ‰nœbœ #œ œ œ#œ #œnœ‰ bœ
#œ nœ #œ &Jœ3 œ3JJ writtenas &J3 3JJ
could have been
Harmony: The “Emancipation of Dissonance,” New Chords, New Systems
Since the late Middle Ages, the basic building block of Western music had been the triad—a consonant, three-note chord (see Chapter 2, “Harmony”). A com- poser might introduce dissonance (a nontriad tone) for variety and tension, yet the rules of consonant harmony required that a dissonant pitch move (resolve) immediately to a consonant one (a member of the triad). Dissonance was sub- ordinate to, and controlled by, the triad. By the first decade of the twentieth
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© 2007 The Munch Museum/The Munch-Ellingsen Group/Artists Rights/Society (ARS), NY//Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY
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