What is Modern Music?

[ardcarp]

Corny response, "I avant garde a clue".

On the Early Music forum the question of defining what counts as 'early music' often crops up, especially when the EMS includes works by the likes of CPE Bach or Haydn. This causes me to ponder, as Radio 3 pursues its New Music theme, where the boundary lies between what is 'modern music' and what isn't. Should splutterings over the Breakfast serial be the yardstick?

Here are some dates:

Schoenberg b. 1874
Webern b. 1883
Berg b. 1885

Boulez b. 1925
Stockhausen b. 1928

Part b. 1935
Reich b. 1936

Food for thought? Would Mozart, for instance, have considered music written even 20 years earlier as being New or Modern?

[ardcarp]

What is Modern Music?

I posted this question on Talking About Music....but maybe it should have been here. I refer (implicitly) to BBC Radio 3's definition.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I posted this question on Talking About Music....but maybe it should have been here. I refer (implicitly) to BBC Radio 3's definition.

It's like "Classical Music" - or, as you suggested on the other Board, "Early Music": a flexible general term that works only so long as you don't enquire what precisely it means! It seems to mean "anything written since the Second World War that hasn't entered (or doesn't fit into) the 'mainstream repertory'" - which, in turn, might lead to a Thread titled "What is Mainstream?"

[french frank]

It's like "Classical Music" - or, as you suggested on the other Board, "Early Music": a flexible general term that works only so long as you don't enquire what precisely it means! It seems to mean "anything written since the Second World War that hasn't entered (or doesn't fit into) the 'mainstream repertory'" - which, in turn, might lead to a Thread titled "What is Mainstream?"

Alternatively, since 'Modernism' is a late 19th/early 20th movement, you might consider Second Viennese School the 'Modern' music; and post-war minimalist/electro-acoustic as being 'New' music. But they're clouds not pigeon-holes.

[Pulcinella]

Isn't modern in terms of music, art, literature, a type, not a period?
Just like we can have classical music not written in the classical period, we can have modern music written after the modern period. Hence the need for the term post-modern, surely?
Others more erudite than I am will elucidate, I am sure!

[french frank]

Isn't modern in terms of music, art, literature, a type, not a period?

Yes, and …

Britannica says: "Modernism, in the arts, a radical break with the past and the concurrent search for new forms of expression. Modernism fostered a period of experimentation in the arts from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, particularly in the years following World War I."

In music that seems to define ethos of the 2VS. It may have also occurred later, but did it occur earlier?

[ahinton]

As FF implies in both of her posts in this thread, what might be thought to constitute "modern music" and what might be though to constitute "modernist music " are two largely quite different phenomena. To me, "modern music" - in tems of the time of its creation - is music written (and/or improvised) by living composers or those who are recently deceased - at least at first glance - but who's to say that Chopin's Op. 10 études aren't "modern music" simply by virtue of their continuing to sound so fresh and new at each hearing?

The experimentation phenomenon - whatever that may be codifed as - mentioned here surely dates back as far as does musical creation itself; I don;t think that one can therefore put any kind of viable date on "experimental music" by which means it could reasonably be defined as a branch of "modern music". Radical breaks with the past occurred inthe decades immediately following the death of Bach (though arguably not as radical as some since).

[Petrushka]

No-one prepared to take up the challenge?

The adjective 'modern' relates to time so I think we have to get away from the notion that 'modern music' has to be difficult or challenging to be considered as modern. The dictionary defines 'modern' as being of the present or recent times so by that yardstick alone, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Debussy or Mahler are no longer 'modern' and haven't been for decades.

The old definition of 'modern music' was that composed since 1945 but that can surely no longer be the case. My own personal yardstick is music composed in my own lifetime (since 1954 in my case) so that encompasses inter alios a fair amount of Britten, Tippett, Maxwell Davies, Shostakovich, Henze. Stravinsky, Turnage, Lutoslawski, Stockhausen and - yes - Bernstein and Eric Coates.

[Beef Oven!]

....music written (and/or improvised)........

= composed.

[ardcarp]

As the discussion seems to have kicked off here, I'll stick the contents of my original thread from Talking About Music below:

Corny response, "I avant garde a clue".

On the Early Music forum the question of defining what counts as 'early music' often crops up, especially when the EMS includes works by the likes of CPE Bach or Haydn. This causes me to ponder, as Radio 3 pursues its New Music theme, where the boundary lies between what is 'modern music' and what isn't. Should splutterings over the Breakfast serial be the yardstick?

Here are some dates:

Schoenberg b. 1874
Webern b. 1883
Berg b. 1885

Boulez b. 1925
Stockhausen b. 1928

Part b. 1935
Reich b. 1936

Food for thought? Would Mozart, for instance, have considered music written even 20 years earlier as being New or Modern?

[Beef Oven!]

No-one prepared to take up the challenge?

Well, last year we had a discussion about the definition of classical music and everyone became bashful!

So don't hold your breath.

[MrGongGong]

No-one prepared to take up the challenge?

I'm sure some of the linguistic folks here will have a go.

But I can tell you something for nowt.... Holger Czukay aint no "New Age" musician

[Beef Oven!]

No-one prepared to take up the challenge?

The adjective 'modern' relates to time so I think we have to get away from the notion that 'modern music' has to be difficult or challenging to be considered as modern. The dictionary defines 'modern' as being of the present or recent times so by that yardstick alone, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Debussy or Mahler are no longer 'modern' and haven't been for decades.

The old definition of 'modern music' was that composed since 1945 but that can surely no longer be the case. My own personal yardstick is music composed in my own lifetime (since 1954 in my case) so that encompasses inter alia a fair amount of Britten, Tippett, Maxwell Davies, Shostakovich, Henze. Stravinsky, Turnage, Lutoslawski, Stockhausen and - yes - Bernstein and Eric Coates.

I think that modern music must be contemporary, so it must relate to time (we can exchange ideas on how far back from the present we can go in our definition of contemporary, but I'll say at once, it rules out Chopin!).

Doesn't that just leave the Britannica definition that french frank quoted?

"Modernism, in the arts, a radical break with the past and the concurrent search for new forms of expression."

My own very subjective opinion (I allow myself such luxuries from time to time) is that modern music is........

Any music, composed from 1890 to present, that radically breaks from the past and either deliberately or accidentally forms a symbiosis with the concurrent forms of new and different forms of expression in the arts.

I am perhaps a dinosaur, in that I include Webern, Mahler10, Varese and similar as modern music. Stockhausen, Boulez, Richard Barrett, Anthony Braxton being even more modern examples from the music that I regularly listen to.

Edit: MrGG's reference to Holger reminds me that recent examples of modern music include the likes Can, Zappa & Beefheart.

[MrGongGong]

It's the stuff talked about in the book with a bit of the listening score to Artikulation on the cover. ?

(Modern Music: Paul Griffiths)

[ardcarp]

I think that modern music must be contemporary, so it must relate to time

That's my view....I think. Just dug out my old undergrad score of Webern's Symphonie Op. 21
On the fly-leaf I have copied out the tone-row. The score itself is covered with a spider web of different coloured lines, drawn by me to link up the notes thereof. It was for me, aged 19 or thereabouts, an interesting exercise, and an insight into the radicalism of the New Viennese School which was then (roughly) 50 yeras old.
Now it's OLD HAT, OLD FASHIONED, NOT MODERN, NOT NEW. Still interesting though. It begs the question why such complexity begets such a short piece and why minimalism begets such long (and boring?) ones. Wow! I've just invented a new genre. Short minimalism. Go on Gongers, tell me it's already been done.......