Module 6
Modern and Post-Modern Art Music
a. Impressionism in Painting and Music
The artistic movement that arose in France in opposition to German Romantic
music has been given the name Impressionism. We are, of course, more familiar with this
term as a designation for a school of late-nineteenthcentury painters working in and
around Paris, including Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), Edgar Degas
(1834–1917), Camille Pissarro (1830–1903), and the American Mary Cassatt (1844–
1926).
You can see the painting that gave the epoch its name—Monet’s Impression:
Sunrise (1873)—at the beginning. There, the ships, rowboats, and other elements in the
early morning light are more suggested than fully rendered. In 1874, Claude Monet
submitted this painting to be exhibited at the Salon of the French Academy of Fine Arts,
but it was rejected. One critic, Louis Leroy, derisively said: “Wallpaper in its most
embryonicstate is more finished than that seascape.” In the uproar that followed, Monet
and his fellow artists were disparagingly called “impressionists” for the seemingly crude,
imprecise quality of their art. The painters accepted the name, partly as an act of defiance
against the establishment, and soon the term was universally adopted.
What irony! French Impressionism, which once generated such controversy, is
now the most beloved of all artistic styles. Indeed, judging by museum attendance and
reproductions sold, there is an almost limitless enthusiasm for the art of Monet, Degas,
Renoir, and their associates—precisely the paintings that the artists’ contemporaries
mocked and jeered. But what is it about the Impressionist style that initially caused such a
furor? What was new and modern about it?
The Impressionists saw the world as awash in vibrant rays of light and sought to
capture the aura that sun-dappled objects created in the eyes of the beholder. To
accomplish this, they covered their canvases with small, dab-like brushstrokes in which
light was broken down into spots of color, thereby creating a sense of movement and
fluidity. Shapes are not clearly defined but blurred, more suggested than delineated.
Minor details disappear.
For their part, musicians found inspiration in the Impressionist art of the day.
They, too, began to work with dabs of color to create fleeting sensations. Claude
Debussy, whose compositions most consistently displayed the Impressionist style in
music, was delighted to be grouped with the Impressionist painters. “You do me great
honor by calling me a pupil of Claude Monet,” he told a friend in 1916. Debussy gave
some of his compositions such artistic titles as Sketches, Images, and Prints. Rare are the
moments in history when the aesthetic aims of painters and musicians were as closely
allied.
Debussy was born in 1862 into a modest family living in a small town outside
Paris. As neither of his parents was musical, it came as a surprise when their son
demonstrated talent at the keyboard and an extraordinary musical ear. At the age of ten,
prodigy Debussy entered the Paris Conservatory for lessons in piano, composition, and
music theory. Owing to his skill as a performer, he was soon engaged for summer work
in the household of Nadezhda von Meck, a wealthy patroness of the arts and the principal
supporter of Tchaikovsky. This employment took him, in turn, to Italy, Russia, and
Vienna. In 1884, he won the Prix de Rome, an official prize in composition funded by the
French government, which required a three-year stay in Rome. But Debussy, like Berlioz
before him, was not happy in then-sleepy Rome. He preferred Paris, which was becoming
in every way a modern metropolis, with motorcars, a subway, and avant-garde art.
Returning to Paris more or less permanently in 1887, the young Frenchman
continued to study his craft and to search for his own independent voice as a composer.
He had some minor successes, and yet, as he said to a colleague in 1893, “There are still
things that I am not able to do—create masterpieces, for example.” But the next year, in
1894, he did just that. With the completion of Prélude à l’Aprèsmidi d’un faune (Prelude
to The Afternoon of a Faun), he gave to the public what has become his most enduring
orchestral work. Debussy’s later compositions, including his opera Pelléas et Mélisande
(1902), the symphonic poem La mer (The Sea, 1905), and his two books of Préludes for
piano, met with less popular favor.
Critics complained that Debussy’s works were lacking in traditional form,
melody, and forward motion—in other words, they had characteristics of the Modernism
that was to come. Illness and the outbreak of World War I in 1914 brought Debussy’s
innovations to a halt. He died of cancer in the spring of 1918 while the guns of the
German army were shelling Paris from the north.
Debussy spent more of his time in the company of poets and painters than with
musicians. His orchestral Prelude to The Afternoon of a Faun, in fact, was written to
precede a stage reading of the poem The Afternoon of a Faun by his friend and mentor,
Stéphane Mallarmé, the leader of a progressive group of poets called the Symbolists. The
faun of Mallarmé’s poem is not a young deer but a satyr (a mythological beast that is half
man, half goat), who spends his days in lustful pursuit of the nymphs of the forest. On
this afternoon, we see the faun, exhausted from the morning’s escapades, reclining on the
forest floor in the still air of the midday heat. He contemplates future conquests while
blowing listlessly on his panpipes.
Not wishing to compose narrative programmatic music in the tradition of Berlioz
or Tchaikovsky, Debussy made no effort to follow closely the events in Mallarmé’s
poem; he wanted a succession of sonic sensations rather than a musical story. As
Debussy said at the time of the first performance of Prelude in December 1894, “My
Prelude is really a sequence of mood paintings, throughout which the desire and dreams
of the Faun move in the heat of the midday sun.” When Mallarmé heard the music, he, in
turn, said the following about Debussy’s musical response to the poem: “I never expected
anything like it. The music prolongs the emotion of my poem and paints its scenery more
passionately than colors could.
Note that both musician and poet refer to Prelude to The Afternoon of a Faun in
terms of painting. But how does one create a painting in music? Here (see Listening
Guide), a musical tableau is depicted by using the distinctive colors of the instruments,
especially the woodwinds, to evoke vibrant moods and sensations. The flute has one
timbre, the oboe another, and the clarinet yet another. Debussy said, in effect: “Let us
focus on the color-producing capacity of the instruments, let us see what new shades can
be elicited from them, let us try new registers, let us try new combinations.” Thus, a solo
flute begins in its lowest register (the pipes of the faun), followed by a harp glissando and
then dabs of color from the French horn. These tonal impressions swirl, dissolve, and
form again but don’t seem to progress. No strong-beat rhythms or clear-cut meters push
the music forward; instead of a singable melody as we know it, we hear a twisting,
undulating swirl of sound. All is languid beauty, a music that is utterly original and
shockingly sensual.
Debussy’s Prelude to The Afternoon of a Faun might be called an example of
“stealth Modernism”—it sneaks up on the listener. His undulating lines and consonant
harmonies are so pleasing that we scarcely notice the novelty: a radically new approach
to line and color. Debussy replaced the German primacy of theme with an Impressionist
primacy of color. For him, color might exist independent of melody and, perhaps,
overshadow it.
Think back to the orchestral music of Beethoven, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky. In
these earlier works, new themes are generally introduced by a new instrument or group of
instruments. Instrumental color thus works hand in hand with melody, alerting us to the
fact that what we hear is a new melody. With Debussy, by contrast, instruments enter
with a distinct color but no easily discernible melodic profile. Thus, colors— and textures
to some degree—begin to replace melody and harmony as the primary agents of musical
expression. Debussy’s approach is a thoroughly modern one, which will later be adopted
by the most revolutionary of Modernists, including Americans Charles Ives, Edgard
Varèse, and John Cage. Not coincidentally, progressive painters, such as van Gogh,
Matisse, and Picasso, began to separate color from line as well.
Orchestras are colorful, but pianos are just black and white—or, at least,
monochromatic in sound. How, then, does a composer create evocative musical
sensations with the more limited palette of the piano? This was the challenge that Claude
Debussy assumed when he began to compose two books of Préludes for piano, which he
ultimately published in 1910 and 1913. The titles of some of these short pieces allude to
their evocative, sometimes mysterious qualities: Steps in the Snow, The Sunken
Cathedral, What the West Wind Saw, and Sounds and Perfumes Swirl in the Night Air.
How does a composer make perfume swirl through music? That Debussy would
attempt to “evoke” such an external sensation by means of an expressive musical gesture
demonstrates a very traditional approach to music, which is well within the aesthetic of
Romanticism. The means by which Debussy achieves his aims at the piano, however,
bring us to the forefront of Modernism. His approach at the keyboard doesn’t involve
color but, instead, alters the basic elements of music: scales, chords, and counterpoint.
Voiles (Sails), from the first book of Préludes (1910), takes us to the sea. As we
hear a fluid descent, mostly in parallel motion, we imagine sails flapping listlessly in the
breeze. The hazy, languid atmosphere is created in part by the special scale that Debussy
employs, the whole-tone scale, in which all the pitches are a whole step apart.
Because in the whole-tone scale each note is the same distance from its neighbor,
no one pitch is heard as the tonal center—all pitches seem equally important. The
composer can stop on any note of the scale, and it will sound no more central, or tonic-
like, than any other pitch. The music floats without a tonal anchor. Next, Debussy creates
a gentle rocking motion by inserting a four-note ostinato into the texture.
Frequently used by Impressionist composers, ostinatos lend a static quality to the
music—repetition stops any forward motion. In contrast to the forward-moving
functional chord progressions created by traditional German composers Bach, Beethoven,
and Brahms, these French ostinatos make musical time stand still. To see the difference,
consider the musical framework of a well-known piece that marches along in a well-
directed chord progression, from “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Notice another aspect of this traditional anthem, the use of contrary motion, a
musical process in which the soprano and the bass go in opposite directions. For every
move upward or downward by the soprano, the bass does the opposite. For five hundred
years in the West, contrary motion had been the rule for good counterpoint—and what we
teach in music theory classes still today. Yet, here, in the middle of Voiles, Debussy
creates a progression of four-pitch chords that consistently move in what is called parallel
motion. In parallel motion, all parts progress together, locked in step, in the same
direction—a very untraditional sound. Parallel motion was an innovation of Debussy, and
it was one way in which he expressed his opposition to the German school, which was so
deeply steeped in counterpoint.
Movement seems to return to the sailing ships as the pianist races through a harp-
like glissando, a rapid rise up or down the scale. This scale, however, is different from the
preceding whole-tone scale. It is a pentatonic scale. The octave is divided into five notes,
here corresponding to the black keys on the piano. The pentatonic scale is often found in
folk music; Debussy first encountered it in the Southeast Asian music he heard at the
Paris World’s Fair of 1889 (see “West Meets East: Removing Cultural Borders”).
Following this energized whirl around the pentatonic scale, the nautical scene
regains its placid demeanor with the return of the whole-tone scale. At the end, Debussy
directs the pianist to push down and hold the sustaining pedal (the rightmost pedal). Once
the sustaining pedal is pressed and held, all notes sounded thereafter will blur into
vagueness, like the hazes and mists that envelop many Impressionist paintings.
b. Exoticism in Music
One of the magical qualities of music is its capacity to transport us to distant
lands. Far-off places can be experienced in our minds, if only through the strange and
mysterious sounds we associate with them. Composers at the turn of the twentieth
century delighted in such vicarious journeys, and their music is brimming with the
“exotic.” Claude Debussy was strongly influenced by the art of the Far East (see “West
Meets East: Removing Cultural Borders”), and so, too, were the famous painters of the
time. Impressionist Claude Monet lined the walls of his home in Giverny, France, not
with his own canvases, but with prints and watercolors from Japan. Their influence can
be seen in the startling portrait of his wife in traditional Japanese costume. Finally, look
ahead at the photo of Debussy and Stravinsky taken in Debussy’s apartment in 1910, and
notice on the wall a copy of The Great Wave by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai. For
Debussy, as for Monet, à la mode (stylishly modern) meant art from the Far East.
The exotic in fashion, furniture, and art is easy to recognize, but how does this
play out in music? Musical Exoticism is communicated by any sound drawn from outside
the traditional Western European musical experience. A non-Western scale, a folk
rhythm, or a passage in parallel motion (the antithesis of Western counterpoint) is enough
to suggest “the other.” Even a single blow on a strange percussion instrument— a
Chinese gong, for example—can magically transport us half a world away.
Although not as distant as China or Japan, Spain was nonetheless considered an
exotic place by Northern Europeans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The culture of southern Spain in particular, only thirty miles from the tip of North Africa,
offered the mysterious allure of the Near East. As French poet Victor Hugo (1802–1885)
said: “Spain is still the Orient; Spain is half African, and Africa is half Asiatic.” Like the
poets and painters of France, French composers created art with a would-be Spanish
character. Debussy composed an orchestral piece (Ibéria, 1908) and a piano work
(Evening in Grenada, 1902) using Spanish melodies. Maurice Ravel wrote his first
orchestral work (Spanish Rhapsody, 1907) and his last ballet (Bolero, 1928), as well as
an opera (The Spanish Hour, 1911), on Spanish subjects. Yet, ironically, neither Debussy
nor Ravel ever set foot in Spain. As a friend of Ravel remarked: “He was the eternal
traveler who never went there.”
Indeed, Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) spent almost all of his life in Paris, a modest
music teacher and composer earning a modest living. (Within his otherwise sedentary life
of the imagination can be noted a single exception: a wildly successful tour of the United
States undertaken in 1928.) For the most part, then, Ravel was content to conjure far-off
lands through his exotic music, as he did in his final “voyage” to Spain—a modern-style
ballet titled Bolero.
A bolero is a sultry Spanish dance in a slow tempo and triple meter. For the first
performance in Paris, on November 22, 1928, Ravel set the stage to look like a Spanish
inn. A single light shone down on a female gypsy dancer, as in JohnSargent’s painting,
Spanish Dancer. Around the room, male dancers sat listlessly, a few holding guitars as if
to accompany the lone ballerina. In a style reminiscent of the seductive gypsy Carmen in
the opera of that name, the female dancer begins, moving with ever-increasing passion.
The men, one by one, rise and join in the dance of seduction. The sound gets louder and
louder. With growing abandon, the entire company begins to sway to the repetitive,
hypnotic music, moving inexorably toward a frenzied climax. After about fifteen
minutes, the melody suddenly rises in pitch, breaking the hypnotic spell, and the work
comes to a crashing conclusion.
Most of the audience that first night in Paris cheered Ravel and his new work, but
at least one woman yelled, “He’s mad!” What excited the crowd’s passions was that
Ravel had written an extended work with only a single melody. The two versions of this
theme—one a major-like form, and the other minor-like—are repeated again and again.
Ravel himself was somewhat ambivalent about his creation: “I have written only one
masterpiece. That is the Bolero. Unfortunately, it contains no music.”
What Ravel meant by this paradoxical statement is that the piece has no
development of the traditional German sort. As with the orchestral music of Debussy,
what makes Ravel’s ballet score effective is the foregrounding of color, texture, and
volume, at the expense of melody and harmony (see Listening Guide). In fact, the melody
and supporting harmony do not develop but are simply repeated again and again by
different instruments over the duration of fourteen to seventeen minutes, depending on
the tempo the conductor chooses. This music is modern in two senses: for listeners of
today, Bolero’s spellbinding repetitions seem to distantly prefigure electronic
dance/trance music; for listeners of Ravel’s day, the crashing, dissonant, final chords said
that music had left the realm of Impressionism and entered the sometimes shocking new
world of Modernism.
Impressionism was not the mother of Modernism—more like its aunt. It possessed
some, but by no means all, of the musical DNA of the later, more radical Modernist style.
To review, the Impressionist style included repetitive, ostinato-like melodies and
harmonies that avoided a well-defined goal, as well as instrumental color just for the sake
of color. Ostinatos, color, texture, and materials taken from non-Western music were the
materials favored by the Impressionists, as Romantic narrative music gave way to pure
Modernist soundscapes. Indeed, how music sounded became what music was. This is a
very Modernist aesthetic—one that even anticipates Postmodernism. But first things first:
on to Modernism.
To point the way, consider, finally, the remarkable historical document seen in, a
photo taken in 1910 that personifies the link between Impressionism and Modernism.
Here, in the Paris apartment of Claude Debussy, the composer stands at ease. Behind him
hang reproductions of two Japanese paintings, including (top painting) The Great Wave,
by Katsushika Hokusai, physical evidence demonstrating the importance of the exotic in
the lives of Western artists at this time. Seated is Igor Stravinksy, looking every bit the
dapper, confident young lion that he was. Debussy and Stravinsky would meet again in
Paris in 1912, when the two would play, four-hands at the piano, the almost-finished
score of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, the opening salvo in the battle of Modernism in
all the arts.
c. Modernism: An Anti-Romantic Movement
Today, Modernist art is no longer “modern” in a chronological sense; some of it is
now more than 100 years old. But, if “modern” means a radical departure from traditional
values, then this description remains apt. It still shocks us more intensely than does the
more recent art of the Postmodernist period (1945–present). As we just saw, Modernism
took the usual requirements for a poem—that it make sense as a narrative or image and
possess proper grammar and syntax—and turned them upside down. So, too, with
Modernist music, the concertgoer’s expectations for what makes a good melody, pleasing
harmony, and regular meter were confounded. Listeners of the early twentieth century
were just as baffled by the Modernist sounds of Stravinsky and Schoenberg as they were
by the poetry of Gertrude Stein.
Why did such a radically different kind of expression emerge shortly after 1900?
In part, because of a violent social disruption that shook Europe and (to a far lesser
degree) North America: the run-up to, and outbreak of, World War I. For the Western
world, the first two decades of the twentieth century constituted a social earthquake of the
highest magnitude. World War I (1914–1918) left 9 million soldiers dead on the
battlefields—27,000 French infantry in a single day on a single field. Shocked by the
carnage, intellectuals turned away from the predominantly idealistic, sentimental
aesthetics of Romanticism—how could one think of love and beauty in the face of
wholesale destruction? For writers, painters, and composers alike, disjunction, anxiety,
even hysteria became valid artistic sentiments that reflected the realities of the day. The
epicenter of this upheaval was, again, France and Germany.
As early as 1870, France and Germany had fought what we now call the
FrancoPrussian War, and tensions simmered ominously throughout the decades that
followed. Developments in the arts mirrored the unsettled times. In fin-de-siècle (end-of-
nineteenth-century) Paris, we saw how the Impressionists, led by Debussy, mounted a
quietly sensual protest against the extremes of German Romanticism. Shortly thereafter,
Modernism—in the hands of the revolutionary Russian expatriate Igor Stravinsky—
arrived in Paris in full force. In the German-speaking lands, the Expressionists, including
Arnold Schoenberg, staged the most disruptive revolt of all against tonality and tradition,
conveying their anxiety through radical dissonance. With Modernism, shock began to
replace beauty as the defining component of musical art.
Not all listeners were pleased with this Modernist approach. Schoenberg’s early
experiments with dissonance were at first received with hoots from a hostile public in
Vienna in 1913; that same year, Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring)
caused a riot at its Parisian premiere. But Modernist artists like Stein, Stravinsky, and
Schoenberg were determined to issue the public a wake-up call, to yank it away from
Romantic idealism and back to harsh reality. So, too, were the painters.
d. Modernist Painting and Music: The Rejection of Representational Art
Photography, as we have seen, was invented in France around 1830, and, by the
end of the nineteenth century, photographic images had become commonplace. Perhaps
there was a connection between the appearance of a machine that could exactly duplicate
the visual world and the sudden disinclination of painters to do so. Whatever the cause,
representational art began to disappear, pushed aside first by Impressionism and then by a
more disruptive new style, emanating from Paris in the early 1900s and called Cubism. In
a Cubist painting, the artist fractures and dislocates formal reality into geometrical blocks
and planes, as in the famous Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, created in 1907 by Pablo
Picasso (1881–1973), where the female form has been recast into angular, interlocking
shapes. Here, Picasso emphasizes two-dimensional abstraction (geometric trapezoids,
squares, and triangles) instead of threedimensional realism.
In Germany, Austria, and Scandinavia, a different, yet equally unconventional,
style of art—Expressionism—developed around this time. The aim of Expressionism was
not to depict objects as the eye sees them but to express the strong emotion that these
objects generated in the artist. In brief, Expressionism is art “inside out.” Clashing colors
and distorted shapes can be used to signify the pain and anxiety of a subject crying out to
an unsympathetic world, as we see in Edvard Munch’s early Expressionist work The
Scream.
Modernist painters and musicians were heading in the same direction, not by
coincidence, but in a real and personal way. Picasso and Stravinsky socialized in Paris
and sometimes collaborated on theater works. And Schoenberg, himself a talented
painter, exhibited his art with an Expressionist group whosemembers included Wassily
Kandinsk. In the works of these artists, traditional “themes,” whether visual or aural,
were becoming distorted to the point of being unrecognizable.
Just as the conventional figure vanished from avant-garde painting, so, too, the
traditional (singable) melody disappeared from early Modernist music. Indeed, there are
very few themes in twentieth-century music that the listener goes away humming. If
Romantic melody is generally smooth and conjunctive in motion (moving more by steps
than by leaps), early-twentieth-century melody tends to be fragmented and angular, like a
Cubist painting. The young avant-garde composers went to great lengths to avoid writing
conjunctive, stepwise lines. Rather than moving up a half step from C to D♭ , for
example, they were inclined to jump down a major seventh to the D♭ an octave below.
Avoiding a simple interval for an agonizingly distant one an octave above or below is
called octave displacement; it is a feature of Modernist music.
So, too, the heavy use of chromaticism, which developed with Liszt and Wagner
toward the end of the nineteenth century, is a feature of Modernist music. In a fully
chromatic scale, all the pitches are an equal distance (half step) apart, and therefore none
stands out as the home pitch by Arnold Schoenberg, notice how the melody makes large
leaps where it might more easily move by steps and also how several sharps and flats are
introduced to produce a highly chromatic line. Octave displacement obscures the tune;
chromaticism obscures the tonic.
Since the late Middle Ages, the basic building block of Western music had been
the triad—a consonant, three-note chord. A composer might introduce dissonance (a
nontriad tone) for variety and tension, yet the rules of consonant harmony required that a
dissonant pitch move (resolve) immediately to a consonant pitch (a member of the triad).
Dissonance was subordinate to, and controlled by, the triad. By the first decade of the
twentieth century, however, composers such as Arnold Schoenberg were using so much
dissonance thatthe triad lost its adhesive force. Schoenberg famously referred to this
development as “the emancipation of dissonance,” meaning that dissonance was now
liberated from the requirement that it resolve into a consonant triad. Dissonance had been
sprung and could now go about terrorizing unwary listeners!
Indeed, shocked audiences at first rebelled when they heard Schoenberg’s
dissonance-filled scores. Ultimately, however, Schoenberg succeeded in “raising the bar”
for what the ear might tolerate, thereby preparing listeners for a much higher level of
dissonance in both classical and popular music. Indeed, the work of Schoenberg and like-
minded composers paved the way, albeit indirectly, for the heavy dissonances of today’s
progressive jazz and the dissonant “metal” styles of Metallica, Kiss, Anthrax, Slayer, and
countless others.
Early-twentieth-century composers created dissonance not only by obscuring or
distorting the triad but also by introducing new chords. One technique for creating new
chords was the superimposition of more thirds above the triad itself. Thus, there emerged
not only the seventh chord (a seventh chord spans seven letters of the scale, from A to G,
for example) but also the ninth chord and the eleventh chord. The more thirds that were
added on top of the basic triad, the more dissonant the sound of the chord. The more such
dissonant chords are placed in succession, the more the music sounds like Stravinsky or
Metallica.
The most extreme new chord was the tone cluster, the simultaneous sounding of a
number of pitches only a whole step or a half step apart shows a tone cluster created by
the American Modernist Charles Ives (1874–1954). You, too, can create this high-
dissonance chord simply by striking a group of adjacent keys on the piano with your fist
or forearm. Try it. Chromaticism, unresolved dissonance, and new chords all weakened
the force of tonality, the “cohesive gravity” that pulled and held together traditional
music. But early-twentieth-century Modernist composers devised substitutes to provide
musical cohesion and unity, as we shall now see.
e. Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971)
Despite his diminutive stature, Igor Stravinsky was a protean warrior for the
avant-garde who commanded attention—and an audience—wherever he went. (As a
student in 1966, this author had a lengthy, but confusing, conversationwith him—was the
composer too old, or was the student too young?) Possessing an uncanny ear for sonority,
Stravinsky created masterpieces in many genres: opera, ballet, symphony, concerto,
church Mass, and cantata. His versatility was such that he could set to music a classical
Greek drama (Oedipus Rex, 1927) one day and write a ballet for elephants (Circus Polka,
1942) the next. Throughout his long life, he traveled with the fashionable set of high art.
Although reared in St. Petersburg, Russia, he later lived in Paris, Venice, Lausanne, New
York, and Hollywood. Forced to become an expatriate because of the Russian Revolution
(1917), he took French citizenship in 1934, and then, having moved to the United States
at the outbreak of World War II, he became an American citizen in 1945. He counted
among his friends painter Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), poet T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), and
fashion designer Coco Chanel (1883–1971). On his eightieth birthday, in 1962,
Stravinsky was honored by President John F. Kennedy at the White House and, later in
the same year, by Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev in the Kremlin. When he died in
New York at the age of eighty-eight, cosmopolitan Stravinsky was the world’s most
famous composer, perhaps the last “high-art” composer to receive such worldwide
recognition.
Stravinsky rose to international fame as a composer of ballet music. In 1908, his
early scores caught the attention of Sergei Diaghilev, the legendary impresario (producer)
of Russian opera and ballet. Diaghilev knew he could make money by exporting Russian
ballet to Paris, which at that time was the artistic capital of the world. So he formed a
dance company, called the Ballets Russes (Russian Ballets), and hired, over the course of
time, the most progressive artists he could find: Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse for
scenic design, and Debussy, Ravel, and Stravinsky, among others, as composers.
Stravinsky soon became the principal composer of the company, and the Ballets Russes
became the focus of his musical activity for the next ten years. Accordingly, the decade
1910–1920 has become known as Stravinsky’s Russian ballet period.
With the onset of World War I and the temporary disappearance of large
symphony orchestras in Europe, Stravinsky, along with others, developed a style called
Neo-classicism, which emphasized classical forms and smaller ensembles of the sort that
had existed in the Baroque and Classical periods. Stravinsky’s Neo-classical period
extended from 1920 until 1951, when he adopted the twelve-tone technique of Arnold
Schoenberg, which he continued to pursue until his death.
Although Stravinsky’s style continually evolved over the course of his nearly
seventy-year career, his particular brand of Modernism—the “Stravinsky sound”—is
always recognizable. In simple terms, his music is lean, clean, and bracing. He
downplays warm strings, preferring instead the tones of piercing winds and brittle
percussion. While his orchestra can be large and colorful, its sound is rarely lush or
sentimental. Most important, rhythm is the vital element in Stravinsky’s compositional
style. His beat is strong, but often irregular, and he builds complexity by requiring
independent meters and rhythms to sound simultaneously (see “Irregular Accents”
below). All of these stylistic traits can be heard in his ballet The Rite of Spring. This
watershed of musical Modernism, Stravinsky’s most famous work, stunned and angered
the audience at its explosive 1913 premiere.
Igor Stravinsky composed three important early ballet scores for Diaghilev’s
dance company: The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913).
All are built on Russian folktales—a legacy of musical nationalism and all make use of
the large, colorful orchestra of the late nineteenth century. Yet, the choreography for
these Russian ballets required not the refined, graceful gestures of Romantic ballet—the
elegant sort that we associate with Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and The Nutcracker.
Instead, these are modern dances with angular poses and abrupt, jerky motions, as can be
seen in the original costumes for The Rite of Spring. The dancers do not soar in tutus;
they stomp in primitive attire. Indeed, here Stravinsky adopts the aesthetic of
Primitivism, a style that attempts to capture the unadorned lines, raw energy, and
elemental truth of non-Western art and apply it in a Modernist context. (Picasso’s Les
Demoiselles d’Avignon inspired by African sculpture, is also an of Primitivism.) In The
Rite of Spring, Stravinsky expresses these elements through pounding rhythms, almost
brutal dissonance, and a story that takes us back to the Stone Age.
Although The Rite of Spring (see Listening Guide) has been called the great
masterpiece of Modernism, at its premiere it provoked not admiration but a riot of
dissent. This premiere, the most notorious in the history of Western music, took place on
an unusually hot evening, May 29, 1913, at the newly built Théâtre Champs-Élysées in
the most fashionable section of Paris. With the very first sounds of the orchestra, many in
the packed theater voiced, shouted, and hissed their displeasure. Some, feigning auditory
pain, yelled for a doctor; others, for two. There were arguments and flying fists as
opponents and partisans warred over this Russian brand of Modernism. To restore calm,
the curtain was lowered momentarily and the house lights were turned on and off. All in
vain. The musicians still could not be heard, and, consequently, the dancers had difficulty
staying together.
First, there is a new percussive—one might say “heavy-metal”—approach to the
orchestra. The percussion section is enlarged to include four timpani, a triangle, a
tambourine, a guiro, cymbals, antique cymbals, a bass drum, and a tam-tam. Even the
string family, the traditional provider of warmth and richness in the symphony orchestra,
is required to play percussively, attacking the strings with repeated down-bows at
seemingly random moments of accent. Instead of warm, lush sounds, we hear bright,
brittle, almost barbaric ones pounded out by scraping strings, percussion, heavy
woodwinds, and brasses.
Stravinsky intensifies the effect of his harsh, metallic sounds by placing them
where they are not expected, on unaccented beats, thereby creating explosive
syncopation, something he had learned to appreciate by listening to American jazz.
Notice, the famous beginning of “Augurs of Spring,” how the strings accent (>) the
second, fourth, and then first pulses of subsequent four-pulse measures. In this way,
Stravinsky destroys ordinary 1-2-3-4 meter and forces us to hear, in succession, groups of
4, 5, 2, 6, 3, 4, and 5 pulses—a conductor’s nightmare, and a dancer’s as well!
The rhythm of The Rite of Spring is complex because Stravinsky often
superimposes two or more different meters simultaneous that the oboe plays in time and
the E♭ clarinet plays in time, while the B♭ clarinet plays in time. This is an example of
polymeter—two or more meters sounding simultaneously. Not only do individual parts
often play separate meters, but they also sometimes project two or more independent
rhythms simultaneously. Look at the reduced score given. Every instrument seems to be
doing its own thing! In fact, six distinct rhythms can be heard, offering a good example of
polyrhythm— two or more rhythms sounding simultaneously.
Notice also in that most of the instruments play the same motive over and over at
the same pitch level. Such a repeating musical figure, as we have seen, is called an
ostinato. In this instance, we hear multiple ostinatos. Stravinsky was not the first
twentieth-century composer to use ostinatos extensively. Debussy had done so earlier in
his Impressionist scores. But Stravinsky employs them more often and for longer spans
than did his predecessors. They give structure to the music. In The Rite of Spring,
ostinatos also give the music its incessant, motorized quality, especially in the sections
with fast tempos.
The harsh, biting sound that is heard throughout much of The Rite of Spring is
often created by two triads, or a triad and a seventh chord sounding at once. What results
is a polychord the simultaneous sounding of one triad or seventh chord with another.
When the individual chords of a polychord are only a whole step or a half step apart, the
result is especially dissonant the passage from the beginning of “Augurs of Spring,” a
seventh chord built on E♭ is played simultaneously with a major triad built on F♭ . This
single chord succinctly expresses the primitive brutality of the pagan world that
Stravinsky imagined.
The subtitle of The Rite of Spring sets the context: Pictures of Pagan Russia. In
Part 1, “The Adoration of the Earth,” a primitive Slavic tribe celebrates pagan
springtimerituals; in Part 2, “The Sacrifice,” a virgin dances herself to death as an
offering to the god of spring. Before the curtain rises on Part 1, however, the huge
orchestra plays an Introduction in total darkness. Inexorably, the music unfolds from soft
to loud, from one line to many, and from tranquil to cacophonous, suggesting all the
creepy-crawly things of the earth coming to riotous life in early spring. As the curtain
rises, primitive dancers pound onto the stage (Scene 1: “Augurs of Spring: Dance of the
Adolescents”), energized by jarring accents and ear-splitting dissonance. To soften the
blows, Stravinsky occasionally incorporates folk music, whether quoting authentic
Russian songs or (more commonly) creating his own melodies with a folk flavor. Despite
the folkloric content, however, the bulk of the composition came from within. As
Stravinsky declared, “I had only my ears to guide me. I heard and I wrote what I heard. I
am the vessel through which The Rite of Spring passed.
Following the scandalous success that attended the premiere of The Rite of
Spring, Stravinsky extracted the music from the ballet itself and presented it as a
multimovement work for orchestra alone. The music itself was now recognized as an
important, if controversial, statement of the musical avant-garde. Later, in 1940, the score
of The Rite of Spring furnished the music for an important segment of Walt Disney’s
early, full-length animated film Fantasia. Disney made Modernism mainstream.
f. Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951)
The second face of early musical Modernism was that of Arnold Schoenberg
(1874– 1951). Ironically, his brand of radicalism emerged in Vienna, the city of Mozart
and Brahms, long known for its cultural conservatism. In the early twentieth century, a
trio of native Viennese musicians—Schoenberg, along with his pupils Alban Berg (1885–
1935) and Anton Webern (1883–1945)—stretched musical Romanticism to and beyond
the breaking point. The close association of these three innovative composers has come to
be called the Second Viennese School (the first, of course, consisted of Mozart, Haydn,
and Beethoven, “Vienna: Home to Classical Composers”).
Arnold Schoenberg, the leader of this group, almost single-handedly thrust
musical Modernism upon a reluctant Viennese public. Schoenberg was from a Jewish
family of modest means and was largely self-taught as a musician. He came to know the
music of Wagner, Brahms, and Mahler mostly by playing their scores and attending
concerts. Like many college students today, Schoenberg reached the age of twenty-one
still lacking a clear professional direction. He had a “day job” as a bank teller, but at
night he satisfied his curiosity through the study of literature, philosophy, painting, and
musical composition. Eventually, his musical scores began to be heard in Vienna, though
they were usually not well received.
Schoenberg’s earliest compositions were written in the late Romantic style, with
rich harmonies, chromatic melodies, and programmatic content. But, by 1908, his music
had begun to evolve in unexpected directions. Strongly influenced by Wagner’s
chromatic harmonies, Schoenberg started to compose works with no tonal center. If
Wagner could write winding chromatic passages that temporarily obscured the tonic
pitch, why not go all the way and create fully chromatic pieces in which there is no tonic
pitch? This Schoenberg did, and in so doing, created what is called atonal music—music
without tonality, without a key center.
Schoenberg’s contemporaries found his atonal music difficult to understand. After
all, this was the period in which all of Vienna was dancing to the tuneful waltzes of
Johann Strauss. Not only did Schoenberg’s music have no tonal center, but his melodies
were highly disjunctive, his harmonies exceedingly dissonant, and his rhythms
undanceable. Some performers refused to play his music, and, when others did, the
audience’s reaction was occasionally violent. At one concert on March 31, 1913, the
police had to be called in to restore order. Fortunately for Schoenberg, he possessed a
characteristic typical of innovative geniuses throughout history: self-confidence. As he
said, “One must be convinced of the infallibility of one’s own fantasy; one must believe
in one’s own creative spirit.”
Pierrot lunaire (Moonstruck Pierrot), Schoenberg’s best-known composition, is an
exemplary work of Expressionist art. Schoenberg aimed to create an intimate chamber
work for small ensemble and female singer, who declaims twenty-one poems by Albert
Giraud. Here, we meet Pierrot, a sad clown from the world of traditional Italian
pantomime and puppet shows—always in love but never successful. In this Expressionist
poetry, the clown has fallen under the sway of the moon and has changed into an
alienated modern artist. Pierrot projects his inner anxiety by means of Sprechstimme
(German for “speech-voice”; indicated by an “x” in the Listening Guide), a technique that
requires the vocalist to declaim the text rather than to sing it. The singer must execute the
rhythmic values exactly, but once the singer hits a pitch, he or she should quit the tone
immediately, sliding away in either a downward or an upward direction. This creates the
exaggerated, sometimes hysterical declamation that one might hear from a lunatic, which
is appropriate for Pierrot, given the lunar spell cast upon him. Indeed, some translate the
title as Pierrot Insane.
Poem 6, Madonna, of Pierrot lunaire (see Listening Guide) depicts the clown’s
tormented, hallucinatory vision of the suffering Madonna (Mother of Christ) at the cross.
Note that the poet builds a refrain (boldface) into the text: O Mutter aller Schmerzen (“O
Mother of all sorrows”). Traditionally, composers had taken the appearance of a textual
refrain as a cue to repeat the melody as well, thereby creating musical unity over the
course of the work. However, Schoenberg, ever the iconoclast, avoids any and all
repetition. Instead, his music unfolds in a continuum of ever-new sounds. For the listener,
this creates a difficulty: The human psyche finds an unending series of new things—
sounds or otherwise—very unsettling. Thus, the listener’s first reaction to the dissonant
continuum of pitches in Pierrot lunaire may be decidedly negative. Yet, with repeated
hearings, the force of the jarring elements of the atonal style begins to lessen, and a
bizarre, eerie sort of beauty emerges, especially if the listener is sensitive to the meaning
of the text.
When Schoenberg created atonal music, as heard in Pierrot lunaire, he also
created a serious artistic problem. Having removed the traditional building blocks of
music (consonant triads, tonal chord progressions, and tonal centers), what musical
structures would replace them? If all twelve notes of the chromatic scale are equally
important, as is true in atonal music, why choose any one pitch or another at a given
moment? What was needed was a system. As composer Leonard Bernstein said about
Schoenberg and this moment in music history: “A German has to have a system!”
By 1923, Schoenberg had solved the problem of “formal anarchy”—the absence
of form caused by total chromatic freedom. He discovered a new way of creating music
that he called “composing with twelve tones.” Twelve-tone composition is a method of
writing atonal music that uses each of the twelve notes of the chromatic scale set in a
fixed, predetermined order. The composer begins by arranging the twelve notes of the
chromatic scale in a sequence of his or her choosing, forming a “tone row.” Throughout
the composition, these twelve notes must appear in the same order. Music in which
elements such as pitch, timbre, or dynamics come in a fixed series is called serial music.
In twelve-tone music, the twelve-note series may unfold not only as a melody but also as
a melody with accompaniment, or simply as a progression of chords, because two or
more notes in the row may sound simultaneously. Moreover, in addition to appearing in
its basic form, the row might go backward (retrograde) or upside down (inversion), or
both backward and upside down at the same time (retrograde inversion). While such
arrangements might seem wholly artificial and very unmusical, we should remember that
composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach in the Baroque era and Josquin Desprez in the
Renaissance sometimes subjected their melodies to similar permutations. The purpose of
Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method was to create musical unity by basing each piece on a
single, orderly arrangement of twelve tones, thereby guaranteeing the perfect equality of
all pitches so that none would seem like a tonal center.
Schoenberg’s first steps along this radical twelve-tone path were tentative, and the
pieces he created were very short. Among Schoenberg’s first serial compositions was his
Suite for Piano, a collection of seven brief dance movements, including the Minuet and
Trio, discussed below.
Schoenberg allows the row or any of its permutations to begin on any pitch, as
long as the original sequence of intervals is maintained. Notice in the Trio, for example,
that the row itself begins on E♭ but is also allowed to start on B♭ (see Listening Guide).
In the second part, measures 6–9, the exact serial progression of the row breaks down
slightly. The composer explained this as a “justifiable deviation,” owing to the need for
tonal variety at this point. Notice also that the rhythms may also be changed for the sake
of variety. As you listen to the Trio, see if you can follow the unfolding of the row and all
its permutations by following the numbers. Listen many times—the piece is only fifty-
one seconds long! Its aesthetic effect is similar to that of a constructivist painting by an
artist like Theo van Doesburg. If you like the abstract mechanical precision of the
painting, you’ll likely enjoy Schoenberg’s twelve-tone piano piece as well.
Although the twelve-tone process became the rage among Modernist composers
—even Stravinsky came under its sway—audiences never fully embraced it. Why would
anyone write music that is mechanistic and not pretty? For Schoenberg, “pretty” was not
the point; as this piano piece proves, the job of art is to stimulate as well as satisfy.
Nevertheless, most music lovers continued to find Schoenberg’s twelve-tone style
inaccessible. Audiences intuited that twelve-tone music is unnatural because it is not
based on the sounds of the primary overtones (octave, fifth, fourth, and triad) that
produce consonance to our ears.
Oddly, the listening public ultimately won, for twelve-tone composition
disappeared with the Modernist movement. Indeed, the twelve-tone system has been
called one of the two great failed experiments of the twentieth century, the other being
Communism. Schoenberg was philosophical about the public’s general dislike of his
music, offering this provocative conundrum: “If it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all,
it is not art.
g. Charles Ives (1874–1954)
Charles Ives was an American original, arguably the greatest—and certainly the
most experimental—of American Modernist composers. He was born in Danbury,
Connecticut, the son of George Ives (1845–1894), a bandleader in the Union army who
had served with General Ulysses S. Grant during the Civil War. The senior Ives gave his
son a highly unorthodox musical education, at least by European standards. The
obligatory study of the three B’s (Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms); instruction in harmony
and counterpoint; and lessons on the violin, piano, organ, cornet, and drums were all
included. But young Ives also learned, as he put it, to “stretch his ears.” In one exercise,
for example, he was made to sing “Swanee River” in E♭ while his father accompanied
him on the piano in the key of C—a useful lesson in polytonality (two or more keys
sounding simultaneously).
Because his forebears had gone to Yale, it was decided that Charles should enroll
there, too. At Yale, he took courses in music with Horatio Parker (1863–1919), a
composer who had studied in Germany. But Ives’s youthful, independent ideas about
how music should sound clashed with Parker’s traditional European training in harmony
and counterpoint. The student learned to leave his more audacious musical experiments—
which included, for example, a fugue with a subject entering in four different keys—
outside Parker’s classroom. Ives became heavily involved in extracurricular activities,
playing on the baseball team and joining a fraternity (Delta Kappa Epsilon) as he
maintained a D+ average (a “gentleman’s” mark before the days of grade inflation).
When he graduated in 1898, Ives decided not to pursue music as a profession,
realizing that the sort of music he heard in his head was not the kind the public would pay
to hear. Instead, he headed for New York City and Wall Street, and, in 1907, he and a
friend formed the company of Ives and Myrick, an agency that sold insurance as a
subsidiary of Mutual of New York (MONY). Ives and Myrick became the largest
insurance agency in the United States, and, in 1929, the year in which Ives retired, the
company had sales of $49 million
But Charles Ives led two lives: high-powered insurance executive by day, prolific
composer by night. During the twenty years between his departure from Yale (1898) and
the American entry into World War I (1917), Ives wrote the bulk of his 43 works for
orchestra (including 4 symphonies), 41 choral pieces, approximately 75 works for piano
solo or various chamber ensembles, and more than 150 songs. Almost without exception,
they went unheard. Ives made little effort to get his music performed—composition was
for him a very private matter. By the 1930s, however, word of his unusual creations had
spread among a few influential performers and critics. In 1947, he was awarded the
Pulitzer Prize in music for his Third Symphony, which he had written forty years earlier!
Having become a gruff, grumpy eccentric, Ives told the members of the Pulitzer
committee, “Prizes are for boys. I’m grown up.”
Charles Ives was an idiosyncratic man with an equally idiosyncratic aesthetic; his
extreme Modernist music is unlike that of any other composer. Between 1898 and 1917,
Ives independently devised the same radical compositional techniques— including
atonality, polymeter, polyrhythm, and tone clusters—that would only later begin to
appear in the works of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and the other European Modernists.
Moreover, Ives was the first composer to use polytonality extensively, and he even
experimented with quarter-tone music, in which the smallest interval is not the chromatic
half step (the smallest division that the modern piano can play) but half of a half step.
Ives’s music places great demands on both performer and listener alike. It is full of
grinding dissonances and dense, complex textures. At the same time, however, it contains
many simple, popular musical elements, incorporating patriotic songs, marches, hymns,
dance tunes, fiddle tunes, rags, and football cheers; this was Ives’s musical America. Ives
often combined these familiar musical idioms with melodies of his own, piling one tune
on top of another to form a new composite. What results is a jarring kind of collage art:
art made up of disparate materials taken from very different places. In a manner akin to
that of a progressive artist, such as William Harnett, who reinterprets fragments of reality
in surprising ways, Ives takes the familiar and “defamiliarizes” it, thereby making the old
sound very modern.
Sometime during the first decade of the twentieth century, when Ives was an
insurance agent in New York City, he revisited his Variations on America and inserted
two interludes. Both are remarkable for their extensive use of polytonality. In the first
interlude, for example, the right hand plays the melody in F major; against this, the left
hand and the pedal perform the same music, but in the clashing key of D♭ ! The same
theme is set against itself, as happens in the visual arts (see the -opening photo, a 1958
collage created by Jasper Johns). Ives was the first composer in the history of music to
employ polytonality consistently, and the result is bracingly dissonant. “America” had
never sounded like this before. Indeed, America wasn’t ready for Ives’s ear-splitting
sonorities. Not until 1949, more than fifty years after Ives began Variations on America,
did he find a publisher that was willing to print it.
h. Samuel Barber (1910–1981)
Is there music that we simply love even though it teaches us almost nothing? Is it
all right to just enjoy music and not be challenged by it, staying well inside our musical
comfort zone? The music of Samuel Barber requires an affirmative answer to both
questions. Samuel Barber was reared in a traditional home, in a traditional American
town (West Chester, Pennsylvania), and he composed mostly in a traditional musical
style (Romantic-Modernist). Being something of a musical prodigy, he was sent to a
traditional music school, the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.
Thereafter, commissions and composition awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes, came at
regular intervals. He had both money and acclaim. What was there not to be happy
about?
Barber seems to have been unhappy from an early age and to have battled
depression throughout his life. Indeed, his first composition, written at the age of six, is a
twenty-three measure piano piece in C minor (of course) entitled Sadness. At the age of
nine, he wrote a confessional letter to his mother, asking that she forgive him for not
being an athlete and not wanting to play football, and enjoining her not to concern herself
with that “worrying secret … because it is neither yours nor my fault.”
Was Barber’s lifelong depression related to the fact that he was gay and (like
Schubert and Tchaikovsky before him) forced to be secretive at a time when
homosexuality still carried legal sanctions and social stigmas? Attempts to draw a direct
connection between personal experience and musical expression are generally misguided,
but it is of interest that Barber’s Adagio for Strings shows up in almost every search for
sad classical music, be it in the “Sublime Sad Classical Collection” or “The Saddest
Music in the World.”
What makes the iconic Adagio for Strings sound so sad? A slow tempo, steady
pulse, generally reduced volume, and heavy dose of low strings all contribute. The music
slowly rises but then falls, and, as the mournful melody appears in successive
presentations, it moves down (through violins, violas, and then cellos), not up, as
Beethoven’s would in a triumphant moment. But, oddly, Adagio for Strings privileges
minor chords no more than major ones and actually ends on a major chord, which is an
anomaly for a sad piece.
What makes Adagio for Strings (see Listening Guide) Modernist music? At first,
it sounds anything but. Indeed, one can rightly call Adagio for Strings an example of
Neo-Romanticism, a style that starts with the musical elements of Romantic music but
reimagines them with an awareness of Modernist musical processes. Barber uses few
biting dissonances, no melodic disjunction (his melody moves mostly stepwise), no
atonality (the home key is B♭ minor), and no brittle woodwinds or pounding strings.
What we hear are the warm, lush sounds of the strings—up to a point.
That point arrives at the very middle of the piece, when a giant string crescendo
begins and works its way upward, pitch by pitch and decibel by decibel, to an ear-
splitting dissonance and mind-bending intensity. During this crescendo, we pass from a
Neo-Romantic to a Modernist style, for the dissonance and anxiety of the modern
mentality are now what Barber wishes to express. By way of analogy, this climactic
moment in which the tortured soul cries out for understanding can be experienced once
again by revisiting Munch’s famous The Scream, an example of early Expressionism.
The shattering climax of Adagio for Strings is Barber’s scream, and, once passed, the
exhausted music settles back to its original melancholic low. The listener can experience
this piece as ABA’, or sadness (depression)-scream-sadness.
i. Aaron Copland (1900–1990)
Until the twentieth century, the United States was a cultural backwater of a
European tide. European symphonic scores, for example, dominated the repertoire of
symphony orchestras in New York, Boston, Cincinnati, and Chicago, among other places,
in post–Civil War America. During the twentieth century, however, as the presence of the
United States grew increasingly large on the world stage, American composers provided
the emerging nation with its own distinctive musical character—one that was not only
attuned to the Modernist style then prevalent in Europe but also that sounded truly
American. The composer who best captured the spirit of the American heartland was
Aaron Copland, who, ironically, spent much of his life within the confines of New York
City.
Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Jewish immigrant parents.
After a rudimentary musical education in New York, he set sail for Paris to broaden his
artistic horizons. In this he was not alone, for the City of Light atthis time attracted young
writers, painters, and musicians from around the world, including Igor Stravinsky (1882–
1974), Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), James Joyce (1882–1941), Gertrude Stein (1874–
1946), Ernest Hemingway (1898–1961), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940). After three
years of study, Copland returned to the United States, determined to compose in a
distinctly American style. Like other young expatriate artists during the 1920s, Copland
had to leave his homeland in order to learn what made it unique: “In greater or lesser
degree,” he remarked, “all of us discovered America in Europe.”
During the late 1920s and early 1930s, Copland sought to forge an American style
by incorporating into his music elements of jazz, a distinctly American product. This was,
as novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald dubbed it, the Jazz Age, when American jazz was a craze
that swept the world. But the Jazz Age ended with the Great Depression, so Copland then
turned his attention to a series of projects with rural and western American subjects. The
ballet scores Billy the Kid (1938) and Rodeo (1942) are set in the West and make use of
classic cowboy songs like “Goodbye, Old Paint” and “The Old Chisholm Trail.” Another
ballet, Appalachian Spring (1944), re-creates the ambience of the Pennsylvania farm
country, and his only opera, The Tender Land (1954), is set in the corn belt of the
Midwest. In 2009, Ken Burns featured Copland’s music prominently in the sound track
of his TV miniseries The National Parks: America’s Best Idea. What could be more
American than the wide-open sounds of Aaron Copland?
Copland evokes a sense of space in his music by means of a distinctive kind of
orchestration called open scoring. He typically creates a solid bass, a very thin middle
texture, and a top of one or two high, clear tones, such as those of the clarinet, flute, or
trumpet. This separation and careful spacing of the instruments create the fresh,
uncluttered sound that is so pleasing in Copland’s music. Another characteristic element
of Copland’s style is the use of Americana; although he uses the dissonant harmonies and
disjunct melodies of European Modernism, he incorporates American folk and popular
songs to soften the impact. Copland’s melodies tend to be more stepwise and
major/minor than those of other twentieth-century composers, perhaps because Western
folk and popular tunes are conjunct (have few skips) and nonchromatic. His harmonies
are almost always tonal and often change slowly in a way that can evoke the vastness and
grandeur of the American landscape. The triad, too, is still important to Copland, perhaps
for its stability and simplicity, and dissonance unfolds slowly against it, rather than in a
jarringly abrupt, Modernist fashion. Spatial clarity, folksongs, and a conservative
approach to dissonance, then, mark Copland’s “listener-friendly” scores.
The clarity and simplicity of Aaron Copland’s music is not accidental. During the
Great Depression of the 1930s, he became convinced that the gulf between modern music
and the ordinary citizen had become too great—that dissonance and atonality had little to
say to most music lovers: “It made no sense to ignore them [ordinary listeners] and to
continue writing as if they did not exist. I felt that it was worth the effort to see if I
couldn’t say what I had to say in the simplest possible terms.” Thus, he not only wrote
appealing new tonal works like Lincoln Portrait (1941) and Fanfare for the Common Man
(1942) but also incorporated simple, traditional tunes such as “The Gift to Be Simple,”
which he uses in Appalachian Spring.
