Moving on

Peter Phillips

Wednesday, 17th June 2009

In the current anniversary-fest the musical world has awarded itself there is an omission which dwarfs the lot of them.

In the current anniversary-fest the musical world has awarded itself there is an omission which dwarfs the lot of them. This is the invention of what many people still call ‘modern music’. For it was in 1909 that Schoenberg wrote his Five Orchestral Pieces and the monodrama Erwartung. These were early atonal works which used such a fantastic variety of harmony, rhythm, and colour, and took place at such an intense emotional level, that they first justified the use of the term ‘expressionist’. Roger Fry had just coined this term, also in 1909, in order to establish a contrast with the passivity of Impressionism.

The term modern music is still indelibly associated with the early experiments of Schoenberg; and it was an invention. He worked out a system for destroying tonality, called Twelve-note composition, which established dissonance as the core of the musical language to be employed. Consonance, or the sounds most people warm to, became extremely unlikely and much frowned upon as being weak. The result was so influential that when people are asked today what they think of modern music they still think of this endemically dissonant style, and more often than not say they don’t like it even though they probably can’t remember a single piece written in it. This is a remarkable achievement on Schoenberg’s part: to have codified something which, despite many decades now of back-tracking from its principles by most composers, still terrorises whole communities. Surely this is an anniversary worth remembering, for there has been nothing comparable in the history of music.

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