How The Meaning of Musical Modernism Has Changed Forever And What This Means for Classical Music
‘Modernist’. ‘Avant-Garde’. Pejoratives often levied towards contemporary and even past composers alike. But what do these words really mean? Beethoven himself was denounced by his contemporaries for his fiery, dynamic music which pushed the limits of instruments and shocked the musical establishment of his time. To them, he was a ‘modernist’ or ‘avant-garde’ –– a reckless experimenter who irresponsibly shook the core of music to its roots. Yet Arnold Schoenberg, one of the most influential composers of the 20th century, is still a ‘modernist’ to our ears despite having died 7 decades ago (closer to the times of Brahms, than 2020). Just like Beethoven, Schoenberg radically altered the course music would take after his death, devising a system of composition which would ‘democratically’ split the importance of notes and harmonies between all 12-tones: atonal music, as we would call it today. How can such profoundly different musical figures both be ‘modernists’? And why are the modernists of today ––(the recently deceased) Pierre Boulez, Milton Babbitt, and others –– seen in such a different light than the past modernist masters, whose music was beloved by audiences and performers alike?
The core of the matter is less about the arbitrary title of ‘modernist’ than the direct preservation of past tradition and practice in modernism, and the resulting engagement of classical music with the larger sphere of mainstream culture. Composers who we might think of as ‘modernist’ or ‘avant-garde’ today –– Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, to name a few prominent Russians –– not only stood on the shoulders of past giants but often actively sought to preserve those legacies and ideas in their music. Prokofiev, in a quote which seems to reflect his occasional traditionalist tendencies, spoke that, ‘There are still so many beautiful things to be said in C major.’ With the exception of the first movement of his 7th piano sonata, Prokofiev rarely ventured into the freshly minted atonal soundworlds of his contemporary Schoenberg or the 2nd Viennese School associated with him Nonetheless, he was soundly a modernist who encouraged forward thinking musical ideas: Prokofiev simply relished his ties to the musical past. Stravinsky, perhaps even more strongly than Prokofiev, also refused to renounce the past musical establishments. He was a student of Rimsky-Korsakov and greatly admired his music as well as the music of previous Russian greats such as Tchaikovsky and Glinka. In fact, his tastes were generally conservative for his time and lifespan, preferring the more traditional Verdi to ‘avant-garde’ (at the time) Romantic composers such as Wagner, and showing great interest in the music of Bach and other Baroque composers towards the latter half of his life. Despite his many changes in style, all his views were grounded solidly in the musical history of Europe. Shostakovich similarly shared a love for Tchaikovsky, combining his mastery of the symphony form with advanced harmony at the forefront of musical development in many of his compositions. He also wrote most (if not all) of his music in the ‘traditional forms’ which past musical conservatives such as Brahms advocated: string quartets, symphonies (as mentioned), preludes and fugues, etc. Furthermore, both Prokofiev and Shostakovich wrote directly for the masses as part of their careers, scoring entire overtures and suites for popular Soviet films of the time. Stravinsky did not do quite the same but he was a companion to (as well as one of) many of the great stars of the time in America and Western Europe such as Walt Disney himself, which cemented his role in mainstream culture. Modernist appreciation for the past was not a trend isolated to composers of Russian origin, either. Maurice Ravel, for example, greatly admired the work of Saint Saens, and we can hear the Parisian wit and dry humor of his elder contemporary in compositions such as Scarbo, the final movement of Ravel’s monumental impressionist suite Gaspard de la Nuit. He was also influenced by the pop and film music of his time, particularly that of his jazzy younger contemporary George Gershwin (in fact, he wrote much of his G major piano concerto with this influence in mind).
So, what is it that separates modernists such as Boulez and Babbitt from these past musical modernists? Between the French ‘modernist’ Boulez and his American contemporary Babbitt, there are 2 components of their philosophies regarding music which jointly deepen the rift between classical/art music and culture as a whole while further separating their own philosophies from those of past modernists: 1. Boulez’s iconoclastic stance towards past musical establishments and culture, arguing that we must destroy and abandon our past ideas to build a new and greater musical system in its place (serialist 12-tone composition, in particular), and 2. Babbitt’s argument that music need not strive to be accessible to the layman, comparing ‘advanced music’ to ‘advanced mathematics’ or science. This is not to say that their ideas are wrong or false per se, but it follows as a natural consequence of them that the role of music as a communicative tool between audience and performer is diminished and undermined. The active abandonment of a connection to the past –– whether it be in the form of Stravinsky’s early Rite of Spring suite (influenced by his late mentor Rimsky Korsakov), Prokofiev’s 2nd Piano Sonata (a similarly early piece composed in a lush late Romantic idiom with modernist tendencies), Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues (based off of Bach’s own cycle of 48 Preludes and Fugues in the Well Tempered Klavier), or Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin (a tribute to Baroque dance suite form with impressionistic splashes of color added in) –– makes it more challenging for contemporary music to position itself in mainstream culture. The lack of accountability between a composer’s music and the audience’s reactions only serves to exacerbate this difficulty.
As a result of these changing notions of musical modernism, while classical music is not ‘dead’ –– and there certainly remain dedicated listeners who will gladly spend their entire afternoon listening to it –– its position in mainstream culture has been severely weakened by notions of severing ties to the past and of musical ‘advancement’ making itself inaccessible to the layman listener. Gone are the days of the feverish Lisztomania which gripped Europe in the early/mid 19th century, or the lucrative recording contracts offered to great composers by major radio stations in the same part of the 20th century. Classical music’s time in the spotlight is basically over. For better or worse, it has become (viewed as, at least) something of an ‘intellectual commodity: an inaccessible hobby generally reserved for the upper class and socioeconomic elite, which common people have no need to engage in or concern themselves with.
