In music, modernism is an aesthetic stance underlying the period of change and development in musical language that occurred around the turn of the 20th century, a period of diverse reactions in challenging and reinterpreting older categories of music, innovations that led to new ways of organizing and approaching harmonic, melodic, sonic, and rhythmic aspects of music, and changes in aesthetic worldviews in close relation to the larger identifiable period of modernism in the arts of the time. The operative word most associated with it is "innovation". Its leading feature is a "linguistic plurality", which is to say that no one music genre ever assumed a dominant position.
Examples include adherents of Arnold Schoenberg's rejection of tonality in chromatic post-tonal and twelve-tone works and Igor Stravinsky's move away from metrical rhythm.
Australia Roy Agnew (1891–1944) Arthur Benjamin (1893–1960) Hooper Brewster-Jones (1887–1949) Peggy Glanville-Hicks (1912–1990) Percy Grainger (1882–1961) Margaret Sutherland (1897–1984)
Europe Austria Alban Berg (1885–1935) Ernst Krenek (1900–1991) Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) Anton Webern (1883–1945) Alexander Zemlinsky (1871–1942)
Belgium Karel Goeyvaerts (1923–1993)
Finland Erik Bergman (1911–2006) Aarre Merikanto (1893–1958)
France Claude Debussy (1862–1918) André Jolivet (1905–1974) Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992) Darius Milhaud (1892–1974) Francis Poulenc (1899–1963) Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) Erik Satie (1866–1925)
Germany Paul Hindemith (1895–1963) Hans Pfitzner (1869–1949) Max Reger (1873–1916) Franz Schreker (1878–1934) Richard Strauss (1864–1949)
Greece Nikos Skalkottas (1904–1949)
Hungary Béla Bartók (1881–1945)
Italy Ferruccio Busoni (1866–1924)
Poland Karol Szymanowski (1882–1937)
Russia Edison Denisov (1929–1996) Leo Ornstein (1893–2002) Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953) Alexander Scriabin (1872–1915) Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) Andrei Volkonsky (1933–2008)
Switzerland Arthur Honegger (1892–1955)
North America Mexico Silvestre Revueltas (1899–1940)
United States George Antheil (1900–1959) Milton Babbitt (1916–2011) Elliott Carter (1908–2012) Henry Cowell (1897–1965) Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901–1953) Vernon Duke (1903–1969) Bernard Herrmann (1911–1975) Charles Ives (1874–1954) Harry Partch (1901–1974) Edgard Varèse (1883–1965)
See also Modernism (music) Postmodernism
References
Footnotes Robinson, Suzanne, and Kay Drefus (eds.). 2015. Grainger the Modernist. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Limited; Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company. pp. 3 et passim. .
Dahlhaus, Carl. 1989. Nineteenth-Century Music, translated by J. Bradford Robinson. California Studies in 19th-Century Music. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press. p. 335. .
Suilamo, Harri. 13 March 1986. “Aarre Merikanto – a battered genius". Finnish Music Quarterly.
Leon Botstein. 2008. .
Broyles, Michael, and Denise Von Glahn. 2007. Leo Ornstein: Modernist Dilemmas, Personal Choices. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press. pp. xvi, 119. .
Further reading