Modernism and Music - Essay Example

Coversheet] Words: 3004 The world of art and music has seen various labels being assigned to pieces of art. Modern world has stood witness to many artistic movements that were indelibly affected by the age they started in. Culturally, two such phrases hold a depth of meaning for academics. Modernism and post-modernism are slightly different concepts that for some critics are different names for the same thing and for others are two wholly different dimensions. First and foremost there is a difference in ideology with regard to both terms. Whereas, art is viewed as an agent of social change and more so in a political and social context in the modern art perspective: it is divorced of such importance in the post-modern art era. In fact post-modernists adopted art as a means of expressing individual emotions. For modern art, the same does not hold true since it was more concerned with societal emotions and feedback. For instance, in Italy, the art movement known as futurism played its part in advocating fascism and its ideals. To understand this rift between modernism and post-modernism it is essential to keep the time line and context in mind. The ideals that had earlier fuelled artists and composers alike to create art that was an agent of change gave way to disillusionment with the passage of time and the striking of major catastrophes with the onset of the twentieth century. The same ideals that had led to large gatherings of socially aware fraternities were challenged under the banner of post-modernism: these ideals of nationalism, unity and love were mocked by the post-modernists and being vacant dreams. Post-modernists forsake style and rather expose the mendaciousness of “high art”. Modernism in itself was a mixture of “isms”. It incorporated such diverse artistic movements as cubism, futurism, vorticism, Dadaism and surrealism among many other art movements that took the European stage by storm. The late 18th and early 19th century was a time of inspiration that allowed individuals to come up with wide-ranging ideas. The movement rejected obsolete traditions related to Victorian England and especially the strict codes of defining what good literature, art and music is. During the movement, authors and artists came up with unique manifestos that declared art to be separate from defined forms; for instance, Dadaism, considered everything and anything as art and in fact believed in the random nature of the universe and thus art itself. For the Modernists, art was not supposed to be about thought out paintings with perfect colour schemes and meticulously drawn lines; rather it was a mode of expression with angry colours and shapes, bright geometric forms or even something as seemingly mundane as a black square. For Modernists, it was the thought behind the painting and the expression and feeling behind a piece of work that mattered more than the actual work of art itself. Most importantly, what modernism rejected was the formality attached to older forms of art and music. It allowed for a freer art form seen in the work of artists such as Hans Hoffman, Jackson Pollock and Pablo Picasso. Moreover, the early twentieth century provided reason to authors, artists and composers to break away from the previous constraints of formalized style. It was the era when the work experienced the First World War and experienced shifts in the international political arena. Europe was undergoing a heavy turmoil as countries changed and then reverted back to their alliances: it was the Europe right after the wars experienced by France, Germany and Italy as well as Great Britain that led to a more suspicious environment and hence a tenser state of affairs. Artists, naturally picked up on these strains and went about in their own fashion to talk about their feelings and what they felt was wrong with the world. Just like literature and art, music is also a mode of expression and has been used by musicians and composers for centuries. With the onset of modernism, there was a need to better define music according to newer models and techniques. The search for new methods and aesthetics led to creative experiments in the field of music as well. Western music found new modes of expression during its search for modernist methods of musical forms. A critical idea is that of the presence of popular culture within modern music. Gustav Mahler, Austrian composer is mostly remembered for his work with compositions to establish modern music. The career of Gustav Mahler career echoes the creatively artistic ambivalence characteristic of the last half of the 19th century. Mahler’s intention as a conductor of classical music was to conserve the convention of great musical composers that preceded him – such as Brahms, Beethoven and Wagner. As a composer, however, he sought to introduce new ideas cognizant of modernist tendencies and occasionally cultivated within his own music the music of his more far-reaching contemporary, such as Arnold Schoenberg among other musicians and composers. Mahler’s symphonies are gigantic in nature and hold great depth and variety. Most of his symphonies require huge orchestras to be setup. At the time that Mahler was composing music this sort of work was out of line with the traditions back then. Mahler seems to be, in fact, the perfect example of a musician who went along with tradition and modernity hand in hand. In his own compositions, he preferred creativity and a departure from traditional modes of producing music. Mahler’s music is noted for its wit: he was fond of introducing a jarring sound in his composition to create effect and more importantly to incur a reaction from the audience. A relevant example is the composition of Das Lied von Der Erde, which incorporates Chinese texts among other symbolisms in churning out a musical beauty.1 The study of postmodernism as a valid area of interest has only come about in the late twentieth century when academics showed interest in the relevance of postmodernism and its effects. It is important to note that just like modernism; postmodernism has found its mouthpieces in the form of literature, art and music among other creative forms. Unlike modernism, which was a strong reaction to older ideas and traditions, postmodernism was essentially the blurring of the high and low forms of art and music forms. Whereas earlier, popular music was viewed as a low form of music and classical music was viewed as the high music form; with the advent of postmodernism such preconceived notions came into question. Postmodernists, especially after the development of the recording tape circa 1930s came to believe in the end form of art being the only art form. That is to say the end product mattered alone, no matter what work was put into creating that end product. Music thus gained a far wider audience in the post modernist era. Postmodernist music also raised the question of the relevance of music – whether music was supposed to “talk” about something serious and important and whether it had to fulfil its obligation of pointing out “societal flaws”. Oscar Wilde’s wildly famous saying, “art for art’s sake”, came to be attached to music as well, whereby music was created for music’s sake alone, for pure enjoyment and entertainment, no strings attached. During the postmodernist era music became, like art, an outlet for individuals, most of them unknown earlier, to express themselves in various new ways without paying any attention to subject matter, form or style. Dadaism gained popular ground in Central Europe with the Dadaist manifesto. Marc Lowenthal in Francis Picabia’s book I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose and Provocation writes: “Dada is the groundwork to abstract art and sound poetry, a starting point for performance art, a prelude to postmodernism, an influence on pop art, a celebration of anti-art to be later embraced for anarcho-political uses in the 1960s and the movement that lay the foundation for Surrealism.”2 The presence of Dadaism on music was as much evident as in art and literature. The movement courted support from various composers and artists such as the Czech composer and pianist Erwin Schulhoff, Albert Savinio and Hans Heusser. These composers worked on composing Dada music and allowed their work to not only be published but be performed on Dadaist gatherings. Post-war composition of music falls under the context of postmodernism. Edward Elgar, an English composer is credited with the composition of Cello Concerto, his last major work that achieved the status of a requiem. During the World War I era, Elgar was unable to work on any compositions due to the strain of the war. His post-war work however has left audiences breathless. The Concerto is like a requiem, soul-searching and angry at times. Even through critics have cited streaks of Edwardian England seeping into the work of Elgar’s music, he was highly influenced by German symphonies and sought to incorporate them in his work. In the end, however, he is most remembered for creating a very “English” music, one that is highly distinct from German and Czech symphonies, such as “Pomp and Circumstance.” The formation of western music has been based around the discord between two elemental forms: music and voice. Since the times of the Greeks, singing has been essentially treated as the most important form, keeping the traditions of Orpheus and Dionysus in mind.3 In fact according to Aristotle, “voice is a particular sound made by something with a soul; for nothing which does not have a soul has a voice.” 4 As mentioned earlier, an essential aspect of postmodernism is the non-existence of boundaries between art forms such as literature, art and music and our daily routine that comprises of the political and social arenas. Jean Baudrillard, a postmodernist philosopher has also emphasised upon this particular feature of our life. Moreover in writings with relation to the critique of modernist and postmodernist art and music it has been observed that there has been the acquisition of a new attitude towards the viewing of art and related art forms. Most obviously is the new idea that art is not just the dimension of the rich and the learned; rather both music and art has found a place within the masses and allowed a larger section of the society to find meanings within them. George Rochberg is one composer whose music has been linked with artistic progression with regard to postmodernism. His work extensively comments on the conversion of his music from the high-modernism that was such an evident part of his composition post World War II. Earlier, his music was a mix of “structuring principles of serialisim” and “acoustical dissonance”. The abandonment of modernism’s sound aesthetic by Rochberg came about in the 1960s prompted by his son’s death. Instead, Rochberg embraced the influence of expressive music. This type of music allowed for the mixing of historical musical styles as well as allowed for the adoption of “tonal expressive procedures” that were reminiscent of the nineteenth century. One of his most famous pieces, the Third Quartet is an assembling of music which features diversified styles and forms. Some parts of this work are consonant to the human ear, others are dissonant, however the piece that most captured the interest of its listeners when the piece was first introduced to an audience in the early part of 1970 was the quartet’s third movement, cognizant of string quartets as were previously produced by the great Beethoven. Some critics have gone so far as to equate the art work of Cindy Sherman to Rochberg’s musical capabilities, commenting that both use such mediums so as to incorporate past works and pieced of “iconic composers” and artists (in Sherman’s case). Rochberg has a unique musical compositional voice that borrows from past great influences all the whole incorporating newer methods of modernist pieces within its composition and design. The diagram above is a representation of the technique used by Rochberg when composing modernist music. He worked on the ability of two hexachords to be interchangeable and invert their characteristics to better amend the texture of the piece composed as a result. 5 Rochberg’s semitone classification is important to understand the experiments he was conducting in order to come up with something different from the norm.6 The one glaring difference between the modernist and the postmodernist theory is with relation to the employing of ‘isms’. It is universally acknowledged that the era of modernism was a slave to various artistic and cultural movements, a plethora of ‘isms’ that propounded newer theories and radical ideas with each passing day. Unlike modernist theory, post modernist theory seems to show abhorrence for the employment of any ‘isms’ when categorizing the postmodernist perspective whether be it in relation to literature, art or music. Most postmodern composers were more concerned with music that spoke of a global and spiritual context rather than aligned itself to cultural and social contexts; this resulted in a deflection from the various ‘isms’ that were so integral to the development and progression of modernist theory and practice. The work of Luciano Berio is credited as being a major step towards musical postmodernism. The premier of his 1968 work Sinfonia is one of the earliest examples of musical postmodernism. The work is so credited because of its involvement of a collective musical past. The “five-movement” work features musical greats such as Mahler, Debussy, Berlioz, Ravel, Webern, Strauss and Stravinsky among many others. Along with the employment of the music of these past musical giants, Sinfonia also features the reading of a variety of texts that feature Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable, passages from the texts of James Joyce and others, instructions on how to produce and read scores as well as the work of Berio himself. 7 It is noteworthy that Berio was loathe to his work being inspired from a form of collage work in art that was so popular at the time. He tried to achieve musical harmony in aesthetically uniting and arranging musical pieces from past eras and decades to provide a fresh piece that was simultaneously original. His work was heavily criticised by critics such as Harold Schonberg. Writing in the New York Times in the year 1968, he wrote: “This music is a sort of stream-of-consciousness collage. How to describe all this? Music of the absurd perhaps. But it moves, and it has force, and it never lets the attention down. In a way this kind of composition is a synthesis, making use of many of the schools of music that have come up since World War II.” Postmodernist strands usually focus on what music needs to be about in direct contrast to modernist theory. Earlier, modernist theory propounded the basic and most pure elemental music forms, be they “intervals, motivic fragments or rhythms”. Postmodernists are more concerned with reaching out to the audience – or the consumer market – whereas modernists were focused on bringing out the “truth” or reality through arts forms to the audience and listener. Daniel Albright notes that a “related aspect of post-modern classical music was an interest in reducing the role of a composer in musical composition, not by the use of pre-composed material, but instead by the use of random procedures in composition and performance.” 8 John Cage and Lou Harrison are two composers that worked tirelessly to promote the modernist concept of music. Writing in 1940s they wrote extended pieces for the percussion orchestra and piano pieces. Cage is considered to have possession of radical “edge” that did not soften overtime.9 (Elliot Schwartz, 1996) His compositions were hugely popular among audiences and his works featured modes that the audience had not the chance to come across before. He was experimental with his music and with the progression of modernist times adjusted as such. Undoubtedly he came to be termed as one of the leading men to take up the post-war avant-garde ideals in relation to music and arts. One of the most controversial compositions of the 20th century, the 1953 premier of 4’33 is Cage’s work. The composition features silence as the music form. The audience is meant to listen to the music produced by the silence surrounding them rather than listen to any actual instruments being played. The sound that the audience perceives in the environment surrounding them is the music Cage hoped to achieve. Another one of his famous modernist works is the “prepared piano”. Cage wrote several popular concert pieces to be played on the piano. His inspiration was the Chinese text I Ching and Cage spent his life working the text of the I Ching into his music. While delivering a lecture in 1957, Cage said that he believe music to be a “purposeless play”. According to Cage, this “purposeless play” was actually "an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we're living". 10 The analysis of major musical and artistic pieces bring to fore the few basic ideas behind the modern and postmodern concepts. Whereas modernism can be termed as being an original quest for the need to find a purpose in the late 19th and early 20th century; some critics term postmodernism and ‘degenerate modernity’. Theodor Adorno is one such critic. For him the emergence of postmodernism after the inception of modernism is banal and crude and that most trends in postmodernism are actually a degenerate version of the ideas presented in modernism. With respect to composers such as Cage, the ideology propounded by modernism seems to fit in exactly with what he tried to experiment and bring about through his music. Cage’s era was filled with experimentation and the need to constantly try to achieve new grounds and meanings. His compositions are cognizant of his struggle towards achieving those ideals all the while remaining in certain barriers. 11 Post-modernist works, such as the compositions of Berio and Rochberg tilt more towards the ability of art and music to define itself without staying confined within barriers and limits. The need to reunite the past with the present is strongly felt in postmodernist works – a need that seems to be missing from the modernist pieces of music. The works that have been chosen to display the various characteristics of the modernist and postmodernist eras are closely true depictions of the atmosphere and culture of the time and showcase the cause and effect brought about art forms as powerful as musical compositions. Bibliography Albright, Daniel. Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Conner, Steve. The Decomposing Voice of Postmodern Music. London: The John Hopkins University Press, 2001. Forte, Allen. The Structure of Atonal Music. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973. Lochhead, Judy. "Music and the Post Modern." New Formations (2009): 27-35. Perloff, Marjorie, and Junkerman, Charles. John Cage: Composed in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Schwartz, Elliott and Godfrey, Daniel. Music Since 1945: Issues, Materials and Literature. New York. MacMillan Publishing Company, 1996 Read More

Just like literature and art, music is also a mode of expression and has been used by musicians and composers for centuries. With the onset of modernism, there was a need to better define music according to newer models and techniques. The search for new methods and aesthetics led to creative experiments in the field of music as well. Western music found new modes of expression during its search for modernist methods of musical forms. A critical idea is that of the presence of popular culture within modern music.

Gustav Mahler, Austrian composer is mostly remembered for his work with compositions to establish modern music. The career of Gustav Mahler career echoes the creatively artistic ambivalence characteristic of the last half of the 19th century. Mahler’s intention as a conductor of classical music was to conserve the convention of great musical composers that preceded him – such as Brahms, Beethoven and Wagner. As a composer, however, he sought to introduce new ideas cognizant of modernist tendencies and occasionally cultivated within his own music the music of his more far-reaching contemporary, such as Arnold Schoenberg among other musicians and composers.

Mahler’s symphonies are gigantic in nature and hold great depth and variety. Most of his symphonies require huge orchestras to be setup. At the time that Mahler was composing music this sort of work was out of line with the traditions back then. Mahler seems to be, in fact, the perfect example of a musician who went along with tradition and modernity hand in hand. In his own compositions, he preferred creativity and a departure from traditional modes of producing music. Mahler’s music is noted for its wit: he was fond of introducing a jarring sound in his composition to create effect and more importantly to incur a reaction from the audience.

A relevant example is the composition of Das Lied von Der Erde, which incorporates Chinese texts among other symbolisms in churning out a musical beauty.1 The study of postmodernism as a valid area of interest has only come about in the late twentieth century when academics showed interest in the relevance of postmodernism and its effects. It is important to note that just like modernism; postmodernism has found its mouthpieces in the form of literature, art and music among other creative forms.

Unlike modernism, which was a strong reaction to older ideas and traditions, postmodernism was essentially the blurring of the high and low forms of art and music forms. Whereas earlier, popular music was viewed as a low form of music and classical music was viewed as the high music form; with the advent of postmodernism such preconceived notions came into question. Postmodernists, especially after the development of the recording tape circa 1930s came to believe in the end form of art being the only art form.

That is to say the end product mattered alone, no matter what work was put into creating that end product. Music thus gained a far wider audience in the post modernist era. Postmodernist music also raised the question of the relevance of music – whether music was supposed to “talk” about something serious and important and whether it had to fulfil its obligation of pointing out “societal flaws”. Oscar Wilde’s wildly famous saying, “art for art’s sake”, came to be attached to music as well, whereby music was created for music’s sake alone, for pure enjoyment and entertainment, no strings attached.

During the postmodernist era music became, like art, an outlet for individuals, most of them unknown earlier, to express themselves in various new ways without paying any attention to subject matter, form or style. Dadaism gained popular ground in Central Europe with the Dadaist manifesto. Marc Lowenthal in Francis Picabia’s book I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose and Provocation writes: “Dada is the groundwork to abstract art and sound poetry, a starting point for performance art, a prelude to postmodernism, an influence on pop art, a celebration of anti-art to be later embraced for anarcho-political uses in the 1960s and the movement that lay the foundation for Surrealism.

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