The 20th century

Wagner’s highly expressive harmonic bequest could not but drive chromaticism eventually beyond the retaining confines of the idea of a central key, for the extensive use of chromatic chords tends to blur the listener’s ability to perceive the basic harmonic relationships that define a key. In their nontonal compositional procedures, Arnold Schoenberg and his 20th-century Second Viennese school abandoned the concept of key, using all notes freely without relating them to the system of functional harmony. They thus represent not so much a reaction to as a logical extension of Wagnerian principles. Wagner’s compelling artistic personality certainly exercised near-magic powers over many of his younger contemporaries and successors, exceeding even Beethoven’s spell. But others, too, contributed to “the music of the future.” As Schoenberg was to point out in one of his remarkable essays, even Brahms, who looked upon himself as a conservative in the best sense of the term, was, historically speaking, a true “progressive,” especially in his propensity for irregular phrasing and complex motivic manipulations.

The growth of political nationalism in the “peripheral” countries of Europe also had significant repercussions in musical composition. In the last half of the 19th century distinctive folk-music elements, previously totally unheeded by Europe’s elitist musical cultures, found enthusiastic response in sophisticated circles, exerting an “exotic” attraction similar to that which had accounted earlier in the century for the Romantic infatuation with Eastern civilizations. Thus at a time when the exhaustion of Europe’s “civilized” compositional resources appeared imminent, the “untutored” harmonies of the Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky—steeped in the spirit of Russian folk music and based on chord progressions alien to the standard harmonic usage of his day—helped breathe new life into a harmonic language about to succumb to redundant overdoses of functional chromaticism. Mussorgsky thus paved the way for the later whole-tone and pentatonic (five-note scale) experiments of Claude Debussy and Béla Bartók.

What was being questioned publicly in many quarters at the dawn of the 20th century was the evolutionistic view of Western art music as man’s ultimate achievement in the realm of sound and its logical consequent that 19th-century harmony represented in turn music’s most advanced stage of development. This increasing skepticism, given by the nature of late 19th-century music itself, was strongly reinforced by the growing awareness of historical compositional techniques that resulted from the mushrooming discoveries of musicological scholarship. Before long, all manner of pre-19th-century textures and structural principles were seized upon to counteract the type of self-defeating post-Wagnerianism—so tragically exemplified in several of the most ambitious works of Max Reger. The 20th-century search for fresh, flexible techniques extended far beyond the nontonal Second Viennese school of Schoenberg. In historical perspective, Anton Webern’s fascination with 15th-century canonic techniques, Paul Hindemith’s predilection for both modal and early-18th-century polyphony, Igor Stravinsky’s emulation of Domenico Scarlatti, and, for that matter, Kurt Weill’s reinterpretation of John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (1728) represent but various individual and culturally conditioned manifestations of the same determination: to put the burden of history to positive use in a concerted effort to revitalize an art that seemed moribund by the time World War I changed the socio-economic and political physiognomy of Europe.

Historically, Schoenberg’s formulation of the laws of composition with 12 tones—involving the consistent melodic and harmonic use of a specifically arranged sequence of the 12 notes of the chromatic scale—sprang in the early 1920s from the same obsession with textural and structural clarity that marked the postwar Neoclassical syndrome as a whole. Schoenberg himself may have considered his most fundamental contribution to musical history to be “the emancipation of dissonance”—a relativistic conception of intervals and chords that disregarded the careful regulation of dissonance characteristic of functional harmony. Actually, the 12-tone procedures he developed so consistently served to restore, to an extent far beyond that which Mahler had been able to achieve within the traditional harmonic framework, the primacy of motivic-contrapuntal development as a musical resource. Thus it was that the profusion of simultaneous melodies that animates Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 in G Major (completed 1900) found its ultimate potential realized in Schoenberg’s most uncompromising polyphonic work, the Wind Quintet (1924).

Possibly the most successful attempt to regenerate Beethovenian procedures without the total abandonment of functional tonality is represented by the string quartets and certain other instrumental compositions of Bartók. Drawing upon the rhythmic-melodic properties of Hungarian and Romanian folk music, Bartók produced a unique type of functionally extended harmony determined largely by the contrapuntal interaction of motives. Others, such as Charles Ives in the United States and, under the impact of South American popular music, Darius Milhaud in France, transcended traditional tonality by writing polytonally (in two or three keys simultaneously).

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Whatever their specific approach, progressive 20th-century composers everywhere clearly gave precedence to melodic-rhythmic energies. Even instrumental colour was pressed into the service of melodic definition. Years before World War I Schoenberg had advocated in practice (Five Orchestral Pieces) and in theory (Harmonielehre, 1911; Theory of Harmony, 1947 [the English edition omits the pertinent chapter]) the idea of tone-colour melody, or Klangfarbenmelodie. But it was his pupil Webern who, in his mature works, divided the individual components of melodic phrases over several instruments as an imaginatively coloristic reinforcement of the complex polyphony that characterized his style. After World War II Webern’s procedures were adopted enthusiastically by composers on both sides of the Atlantic. Living in increasingly automated societies, the post-Webern composers soon discovered total serialism, a manner of composition in which all musical parameters follow numerical rules laid down in the course of what has been called the precompositional process. Whereas Schoenberg’s row technique merely fixed the sequence of the 12 pitches of the chromatic scale in accordance with the motivic context of a given piece, Webern had indeed begun to serialize rhythm and to some extent instrumentation, possibly under the influence of medieval isorhythmic techniques. But total serialization, as practiced by the post-Webernians, left little, if anything, to spontaneous inspiration, and the 1950s thus witnessed the closing of a creative circle initiated during the early Middle Ages when spontaneous inspiration was manifestly suspect. Perhaps inevitably, such a hermetically closed system of composition provoked reactions that moved the aesthetic pendulum violently to the extreme opposite position. Spur-of-the-moment action became the watchword in music as well as in life generally. Aleatory (chance-music) composition in its more radical manifestations provides only minimal guidelines for performers who are told to improvise freely within certain temporal or spatial limitations, or both.

Thus, with the 20th century in its final quarter, the West has returned, insofar as is possible, to the pre-typographical stage when musical tradition was essentially oral. More than that, the relatively recent replacement of “the public,” once essentially the cultural elite, by a whole host of publics to whom mutually exclusive types of composers cater with great solicitude, suggests that the private musical life of the immediate past is in the process of being transplanted by experiences serving, among other things, the identification of special group interests and needs. At the same time, novelty rather than originality has become the order of the day. Musical compositions, electronically recorded—more recently also electronically produced—and distributed as salable items by mass-oriented corporations, have attained the status of physical objects that are easily discarded and replaced. Still, there are those who try to transform the burdens of history into significant new forms of composition. A new eclecticism is in the making, destined perhaps to preserve a long tradition that has been among the West’s proudest achievements.