music paper
YANGYANG
kerman7e_ch20preludemodernism-1.pptChapter 20
Prelude:
Music and Modernism
Progress and Uncertainty
- Rapid industrialization, social change
- Awareness of dark side of progress
- New ways of thinking
- Einstein’s theory of relativity
- Darwin’s theory of evolution
- Freud’s psychological theories
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Modernism
- A movement of radical experimentation
- Not “contemporary” or “modern”
- Anti-traditionalism, avant-garde
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The Response of Modernism
- Abstract, nonrepresentational painting
- New languages for art
- Stream-of-consciousness writing
- New and dissonant harmonies
- Unconventional melodies and scales
- Unconventional rhythms and meters
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Experiment and Transformation: Melody
- Viennese Classical music—tunes foremost
- Late Romantics—introduced distorted, confusing qualities
- Modernists
- Complex melodies that made no “sense”
- Suggestions of melody without tunes
- Abstracted or fragmented melodies
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New Non-Western Influences
- Composers encountered more non-Western music
- Some tried to recapture these sounds
- New tone colors and melodies
- Pentatonic scale from folk songs and Asian music
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Other New Scales
- Whole-tone scale
- Divides octave into six whole steps
- Octatonic scale
- Eight pitches to an octave, alternating whole and half steps
- Serialism
- Not a scale, but a new language for music
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“The Emancipation
of Dissonance”
- Freedom from the need to resolve
- Melody more complex, harmonies more dissonant
- Development of atonal music
- No tonal center at all
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Key Terms
- Modernism
- Avant-garde
- Impressionism
- Atonality
- Whole-tone scale
- Pentatonic scale
- Octatonic scale
