The Arrival of the Twentieth Century

1. The Arrival of the Twentieth Century

2. Impressionism and Symbolism • Turning away from subjectivity in Romanticism and post-Romanticism • Emphasis on sensation • Symbolism in literature • evocation of sensual experience • use of phonemes for their sound qualities • Impressionism in painting • light and color supersede distinct images • irregular surfaces (in subjects and on canvas) • objects in motion

3. Sensualism in musical style • Scoring — strongly emphasized for sensual effects • Rhythm — unmetered rhythms or hypnotic ostinato • Melody — meandering lines or isolated motives • Harmony — nonfunctional (avoids leading tones) • whole-tone scales • pentatonic scales (influence of exoticism) • modes • Texture — layers of foreground and background • Form — free or very simple

4. Primitivism • Based on resistance to decadent overripeness in fin-de-siècle Romanticism and post-Romanticism • Draws on exoticist ideas of reenergizing Western music from other cultures • Style elements drawn from imagined “primitive” music, emphasizing • percussive timbres • irregular rhythmic patterns • narrow-range folklike tunes or improvisatory melody • free use of dissonance • characteristic or programmatic content and form

5. Expressionism • Exaggeration of post-Romantic emotionalism to neurosis or psychosis • Literary style — disruptive, destabilized; stream of consciousness technique • Painting • exaggeration of forms or abstract shapes • juxtaposition of harsh, unblended color

6. Expressionism in musical style • Mysterious or disturbing textual content • Timbral juxtaposition rather than blend; Sprechstimme • Extreme dynamics • Irregular rhythm • Angular melody, awkward intervals • Atonality — most characteristic feature • Complex texture • Short, idiosyncratic forms

7. Charles Ives • New England heritage • Influence of nineteenth-century transcendentalist philosophers — Emerson, Thoreau • Libertarian spirit • rejection of convention • emphasis on originality, experiment • iconoclasm • American resources • Eclectic combinations in collage • Free use of dissonance • Programmatic forms

8. Questions for discussion • Is a literary model valid for understanding so-called impressionist music? Explain how other arts might be viewed as taking this music as their model. • Why did ballet become a particularly important genre for composers in the twentieth century? • Should “beauty” have an essential place in defining art? How is beauty defined? Is expressionist music really not “beautiful”? Not “music”? Not “art”?