♥Modernism (MUSIC)♥

2008-01-30T23:26:00.000-08:00

♪♪Now, Let's Learn What is Modern Music is About... ♪♪

Modernism in music is characterized by a desire for or belief in progress and science, surrealism, anti-romanticism, political advocacy, general intellectualism, and/or a breaking with the past or common practice — Ezra Pound's modernist slogan, "Make it new," as applied to music. Modern music is often thought to begin with, or just after, Debussy's impressionist works, rising to rhetorical, if not commercial, dominance after World War Two, and then being gradually displaced by postmodern music.

Defining musical modernism
Musicologist Carl Dahlhaus restricted his definition of musical modernism to progressive music in the period 1890-1910:
The year 1890...lends itself as an obvious point of historical discontinuity....The "breakthrough" of Mahler, Strauss, and Debussy implies a profound historical transformation....If we were to search for a name to convey the breakaway mood of the 1890s (a mood symbolized musically by the opening bars of Strauss's Don Juan) but without imposing a fictitious unity of style on the age, we could do worse than revert to [the] term "modernism" extending (with some latitude) from the 1890 to the beginnings of our own twentieth-century modern music in 1910....The label "late romanticism"...is a terminological blunder of the first order and ought to be abandoned forthwith.

It is absurd to yoke Strauss, Mahler, and the young Schoenberg, composers who represent modernism in the minds of their turn-of-the-century contemporaries, with the self-proclaimed anti-modernist Pfitzner, calling them all "late romantics" in order to supply a veneer of internal unity to an age fraught with stylistic contradictions and conflicts. (Dahlhaus 1989, 334)

Besides eliminating the progress meta-narrative of the above definition, this definition is also capable of application to more the music, artists, and movements considered modernist: Expressionism & New Objectivity, Hyperrealism & Abstractionism, Neoclassicism & Neobarbarism, Futurism & the mythic Method.

Leon Botstein, on the other hand, asserts that musical modernism is characterized by "a conception of modernity dominated by the progress of science, technology and industry, and by positivism, mechanization, urbanization, mass culture and nationalism", a reaction "reflected not only enthusiasm but ambivalence and anxiety" (Botstein 2007)...

to be continued...:D

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♥Modernism (MUSIC)♥