Modernism (music)

Examples include the celebration of Arnold Schoenberg's rejection of tonality in chromatic post-tonal and twelve-tone works and Igor Stravinsky's move away from symmetrical rhythm.

[9] Daniel Albright proposes a definition of musical modernism as, "a testing of the limits of aesthetic construction" and presents the following modernist techniques or styles: Expressionism, the New Objectivity, Hyperrealism, Abstractionism, Neoclassicism, Neobarbarism, Futurism, and the Mythic Method.

For example, the cultural studies professor Andrew Goodwin writes that "given the confusion of the terms, the identification of postmodern texts has ranged across an extraordinarily divergent, and incoherent profusion of textual instances ... Secondly, there are debates within popular music about pastiche and authenticity.

[13] Goodwin argues that instances of modernism in popular music are generally not cited because "it undermines the postmodern thesis of cultural fusion, in its explicit effort to preserve a bourgeois notion of Art in opposition to mainstream, 'commercial' rock and pop".

Similar to nationalism in its eagerness to rescue the local traditions, primitivism also incorporated irregular metrics and accentuations, a greater use of percussion and other timbres, modal scales, and polytonal harmony.

This can be seen in works of composers such as Charles Ives, Julián Carrillo, Alois Hába, John Foulds, Ivan Wyschnegradsky, Harry Partch and Mildred Couper.

Microtones are intervals that are smaller than a semitone; human voices and unfretted strings can easily produce them by going in between the "normal" notes, however other musical instruments will have more difficulty in achieving the same result.

In the United States, Charles Ives began to integrate American and European traditions as well as colloquial and church styles, while using innovative techniques in his harmony, rhythm, and form.

After the end of World War I, Igor Stravinsky began to return to past Pre-Romantic compositional traditions for inspiration and wrote works that drew elements such as form, harmony, melody, structure from it.

Also influenced by other pioneering works of the Second Viennese School, starting in 1946, the Darmstädter Ferienkurse began an annual summer program in Darmstadt, Germany where Modernist forms of classical music were taught and promoted.

American composers including John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and Christian Wolff[32] formed an informal circle musicians called the New York School.

This can be seen in Cage’s Music of Changes (1951), where the composer selects the duration, tempo, and dynamics by using the I Ching, an ancient Chinese book which prescribes methods for arriving at random numbers.

In the late 1940s, acoustic engineer and radio scientist Pierre Schaeffer created a new style of composition called Musique concrète where recorded sounds are utilized as raw material.

[nb 1] Schaeffer’s pioneering works attracted and inspired a new generation of composers such as Olivier Messiaen, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis, Pierre Boulez, as well as others to try their hands into this new world and develop their own innovations.

In 1977, French composer Pierre Boulez founded the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique / Musique (IRCAM) whose aims included research into acoustics, instrumental design, and the use of computers in music.

[47] In the United Kingdom, a loose group of composers began writing scores in an increasingly complex musical notation that was often atonal, highly abstract, and dissonant in sound.

[49] Instead minimal music focuses on the repetition of slowly changing common chords in steady rhythms, often overlaid with a lyrical melody in long, arching phrases.

In general, these composers strove for an immediacy between the creative impulse and the musical result, which contrasts with the elaborate precompositional planning characteristic of the High Modernists.

Some writers argue that Darmstadt School representative Karlheinz Stockhausen, had anticipated this reaction through a radical simplification of his style accomplished between 1966 and 1975, which culminated in his Tierkreis melodies.

The Second Viennese School were a group of composers consisting of Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils, most notably Alban Berg and Anton Webern, as well as close associates in early 20th-century Vienna.

Spearheaded by Charles Ives, they were noted for their unusual and often dissonant pieces which broke away from European compositional techniques to create a uniquely American style.

[57][58] Neoclassicism was a movement, especially prevalent during the interwar period, in which composers sought to return to aesthetic precepts associated with the broadly defined concept of "classicism", namely order, balance, clarity, economy, and emotional restraint.

Composing in the neoclassical style of Igor Stravinsky, their music was often seen as a reaction against both the late German Romanticism of Gustav Mahler and the Impressionistic chromaticism of Claude Debussy.

The primary members of this group were Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, and Germaine Tailleferre.

The most prominent composers of this compositional school include John Cage, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, Morton Feldman, and David Tudor.

However its usage would greatly expand after WW2 through its promotion by the Darmstadt School, American composers such as Milton Babbitt, and its adoption by Igor Stravinsky after phasing out of his Neoclassical period in the early 1950s.

[60] The most prominent composers of this compositional technique include Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Alban Berg, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono, Milton Babbitt, Igor Stravinsky, Henri Pousseur, Charles Wuorinen and Jean Barraqué.

The compositional material is commonly modified through the application of audio signal processing and tape music techniques, and can be assembled into a sound collage structure.

Stochastic music is a compositional style pioneered by Greek composer Iannis Xenakis in which mathematical processes often found within statistics, probability, and physics are used to generate scores.