Chapter 28:
Modernism in Music and the Arts
Modernism
• Turning away from the predominantly idealistic,
sentimental aesthetics of Romanticism
• Musicians confronted and altered the traditions of
classical music
• Radically transformed the elements of expression,
creating new kinds of melody, harmony, rhythm, and
tone color
• Distorted musical practices, sometimes violently, with
the intention of shocking audiences
• Clear parallels between music and visual arts
– Cubism: Early 20th-century artistic style in which the artist
fractures and dislocates formal reality into geometrical blocks
and planes
Melody: More Angularity and Chromaticism
• Chromatic and dissonant
• Fragmented lines
• Octave displacement
– Avoids simple intervals for more distant ones
– Avoid conjunct movement
becomes
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Harmony: The Emancipation of Dissonance New Chords, New Systems
Dissonances
– No need to resolve to consonance
– Can move to another dissonance
– Tone Cluster
Triad reduced in importance
New chords
Polytonality: Two tonal centers sound simultaneously
Atonality: No audible tonal center
Tone Color: New Sounds from New Sources
• Melody carried by sharper, crisper woodwinds rather
than the lush, gentle sound of strings
• Growing importance of the percussion family; Emphasis
on percussive effects
• Piano used as a percussion instrument
• Important innovation of introducing new instruments or
having traditional instruments make new sounds by
means of novel playing techniques
• Separation of color from line
• New orchestral colors added to the traditional genres and
forms of classical music