# Opening salvo



## Guest (Nov 29, 2013)

I've seen a lot of pieces nominated for the (dubious) distinction of being the first "modern" piece of music.

Starting with Debussy's faun piece from 1894, and including several different pieces by Schoenberg and usually only the one by Stravinsky.

In itself, that activity does not interest me, but I have noticed, just by reading multiple posts by the same people, that the piece you choose as "the first" reveals a lot about what you consider important or representative about the twentieth century.

In that regard, I'll confess that the piece I would choose as the first is Ives' _Unanswered Question._

As you can immediately determine, my idea of the twentieth century does not put a lot of emphasis on things like dissonance or serialism--two huge components of twentieth century music, in most people's minds. (In most professional critic's minds included.) It puts a lot of emphasis on non-narrative values (yeah, yeah, I know--but I would argue that the "story" is a way of describing the way the music works, not the other way around) on non-sequitur, on minimalism (at least two kinds), on silence as an integral component (rather than a pause between two things), on spacialisation (though I won't go to the mat on this one), on the basic concepts of melody, harmony, and rhythm being simplified (if that's the right word) to being pitches going up and down, pitches sounding simultaneously, and events happening in time. That is, pulling those concepts out of a specific, narrative, goal-oriented context in which they had operated for several centuries and putting them back into a more primitive, more fundamental egalitarianism. Sounds happen in _Unanswered Question_ for their own reasons, not according to the previous centuries' rules of musical logic. The logic of _Unanswered Question_ is unprecedented, I think.

The "story," such as it is, does give some clues about that logic, but only if you take the story as describing the music, not the music telling that story.

Anyway, way too long for an OP. Sorry!!


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

A prof once told me it was Debussy's Pal'amd'u faun and that has ever since made sense to me. I don't have the kind of knowledge that would be necessary to make my own judgement, but my ears hear it as definitely different from anything that I know of that came before, and chronologically it works with where I think "modernism" ought to begin in terms of the larger culture. But it also seems late romantic to me, or at least self-consciously decadent ("decadent" used as a label for a movement in literature around that time that IMO could be used in music, painting, arte nouveau design, and so on).


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Written in 1908, clearly precedent setting, and well before Pierrot Lunaire or Le Sacre du Printemps -- unfortunately written in isolation, and not really performed until 1940-something! It has a strong juxtaposition of materials, and polytemporal activity long before others got to either. The piece is truly antique, at one hundred and five years old. Le Sacre just turned 100 this year, Pierrot 101 

So as an historic artifact of one stamp of a kind of modernity, and a strong case for its being first in that, yes of course. But this is a tree which fell in the woods which no one heard, or heard of until a score at least could be seen, and its history is one of many years sitting dormant in Ives' possession for nearly four decades after it was written before the piece got an airing.

No wonder the laurels go to Debussy, Schoenberg and Stravinsky, because those made noise on the international scene, and because of their exposure, the influences of those on so much else that followed gets arrows (duly) pointed in those directions. [[ADD: Debussy's _L'apres midi d'un faun_, premiered in 1894, is both earlier, and more importantly, was the real undoing of harmonic function, that with which everyone was quite busy at the time... and that influence was great and widespread... so no wonder it is most usually "the piece" cited, and still holds a very deserved historic place and position of status. ]]

But the Ives, it is rather like that Milton Babbitt piece which was truly the first to essay total serialization, completed and published _one year prior_ Messiaen's _Mode de Valuers et d'Intersites_, the Messiaen getting the credit for being "the first" in virtually every musical history tome and theory textbook (I don't know the name of that very real Babbitt piece).

Fact of date is something, but not being public, nor making its debut until the 1940's, well it is knotty to then contend its holding that historic place _of influence_: other than the Eccentric Ives writing on his own and then shoving the score in a drawer, its modernity was far less so by the time it finally was publicly performed.

It is not just who did it first, but did it first and the thing going public.

P.s. Every time I listen to Ives' _Unanswered Question_, I am still wholly captivated; time expands (was it really only a few minutes long?) and I am again amazed -- including being seriously impressed with its precedence and age. It so predates the preoccupations of later composers, really from the later half of the 20th century, and that makes it that much more remarkable.


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## ahammel (Oct 10, 2012)

I think it's _Eine Kleine Nachtmusik_.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Five years after the death of Wagner (1883) Satie published his _Trois Gymnopédies_.

If in the context of classical music and what was in general circulation, both new and current in 1888, certainly, _Trois Gymnopédies_ is another very early and great milestone of modernism.


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## isridgewell (Jul 2, 2013)

Like or hate it for me Tristan and Isolde is a defining work that influenced so much in the art world of the 20th Century. Music aside, the notion of an opera where the action and plot is of minimal importance and highlights human emotion can be seen influentially well into the 20th Century in both literature and cinema.

Harmonically it paves the way for so much and its influence on generations of composers is notable, similarly the amount of discussion that it has sparked among those that dislike it is also noticeable. People walked out of the premier not only because of its harmonic controversy but also because of its erotic suggestion.

For me it starts with Tristan!


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

isridgewell said:


> Like or hate it for me Tristan and Isolde is a defining work that influenced so much in the art world of the 20th Century. Music aside, the notion of an opera where the action and plot is of minimal importance and highlights human emotion can be seen influentially well into the 20th Century in both literature and cinema.
> 
> Harmonically it paves the way for so much and its influence on generations of composers is notable, similarly the amount of discussion that it has sparked among those that dislike it is also noticeable. People walked out of the premier not only because of its harmonic controversy but also because of its erotic suggestion.
> 
> For me it starts with Tristan!


The premise of the opening bars of Tristan, and what followed as written along that same premise, blew "harmonic function" of that time apart at its seams: it too, is a milestone piece in dramatically and forever changing the direction changing music took.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

Which version of The Unanswered Question? The version with flutes definitely is my favorite. But just the title itself implies the subsequent question/answer phrasing of the piece, and that's a basic technique of music, the A answered by B...even found in African and tribal folk musics, so that's not what makes it "modern;" the "question" stated by the trumpet sounds quasi-tonal, so that doesn't make it modern for me. In the final analysis, it's the answer of the flutes which do it for me. The answer is a disjointed, atonal mass of flutes, lovely in timbre, yet dissonant and rhythmically complex. Not by any stretch is this response of the flutes a standard phrase; it's the dissonance-for-dissonance's sake nature of it, along with the quasi-speech-like, babbling nature of the phrases that make it truly modern for me, and these characteristics are normal activities for Ives.


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## Eschbeg (Jul 25, 2012)

Not that we need to be deterred much by this, but the Ives exampled is marred slightly by the general disdain Ives had for the early modernists (Debussy, Stravinsky, etc.). Varese once requested to meet Ives; Ives's [prudently unsent] response was, "Varese: go to hell!" Musical techniques aside*, Ives's expressive purposes were directly inherited from the composers he held in highest esteem: the Romantics.

* So compelling was the modernist privileging of musical techniques over expressive purposes, and so persistent have modernists been in claiming Ives as one of their own, however, that Ives himself bought into it and revised his early works by increasing the level of dissonance and tone clusters. Ives's constant retroactive-modernist revising is the main reason why it's so difficult to date his works with any certainty.


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## ahammel (Oct 10, 2012)

Eschbeg said:


> Musical techniques aside, Ives's expressive purposes were directly inherited from the composers he held in highest esteem: the Romantics.


This sentence could very well be describing Arnold Schoenberg.


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## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

The 20th century witnessed innovations in different things. Different composers made contributions in different aspects. If you choose one, you relegate the other. I don't think such a piece exists, because it would have to have all those different innovations in one piece!. And things like that only appeared decades after (for example, with Boulez's Le marteau sans maître).
But, if you ask me, I would choose Stravinsky and Debussy. Schoenberg too, of course. But I must say that I'm more fond of the exoticism introduced by the two composers I mentioned first. Schoenberg's dense and "grave" expressionism never interested me very much, basically because that very german notion of "grave" expressionism does not appeal to me. Maybe that's the reason why I prefer Webern's, more "ascetic" music.


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

aleazk said:


> The 20th century witnessed innovations in different things. Different composers made contributions in different aspects. If you choose one, you relegate the other. I don't think such a piece exists, because it would have to have all those different innovations in one piece!. And things like that only appeared decades after (for example, with Boulez's Le marteau sans maître).


Le marteau is trendsetting in several ways: as a move away from total serialism and 12-tone writing towards something freer, in terms of its unique (at the time) chamber ensemble, and in terms of its synthesis of the approaches of Webern and Messiaen. It takes a lot of its cues from Pierrot lunaire, though, without which it probably would not exist.



aleazk said:


> But, if you ask me, I would choose Stravinsky and Debussy. Schoenberg too, of course. But I must say that I'm more fond of the exoticism introduced by the two composers I mentioned first. Schoenberg's dense and "grave" expressionism never interested me very much, basically because that very german notion of "grave" expressionism does not appeal to me. Maybe that's the reason why I prefer Webern's, more "ascetic" music.


I love Webern's music (as well as many of the works it influenced), but I find Schoenberg has a greater range, in terms of expression and effect.


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## HaydnBearstheClock (Jul 6, 2013)

Haydn's Representation of Chaos.


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## Guest (Nov 29, 2013)

Although it's an interesting question for the reasons given in the OP (for the preoccupations it reveals about the poster), it is not one that any longer particularly exercises me; no more than one's opinion about the number of Beethoven periods. Nevertheless, to play the game, I do tend to think of the 'modern' in music as being - very loosely - the bifurcation between specific pitch-determined music and harmonic function on one side and a focus on timbre and morphologies on the other. Which 'first' piece might that be? I think it has already been answered above. Going a little bit further however, I might argue that truly modern music started with tape composition - a genre that no longer relied on 5-ledger line notation or indeed on conventional musical instruments to mediate the composer's instructions.


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## Taggart (Feb 14, 2013)

HaydnBearstheClock said:


> Haydn's Representation of Chaos.


You mean Jean-Féry Rebel 's Les Eléments (1737)?


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## ahammel (Oct 10, 2012)

HaydnBearstheClock said:


> Haydn's Representation of Chaos.


The first time I heard this, I was all "OMG, sounds like Wagner!"


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## superhorn (Mar 23, 2010)

Bruckner's unfinished 9th symphony may be the most radical work of the late 19th century ; it anticipates 20th century 
harmony to an amazing degree . Its grinding dissonances , ambiguous sense of key in many passages , etc are truly startling, when you realize
that Bruckner was born in 1824, when Beethoven and Schubert were still living .


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## Guest (Nov 29, 2013)

Yay, Superhorn! I'm with 'ya! Well, not too far (he says, backtracking just a little...), but it leaves that Brahms 4th standin', don't it?


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## arpeggio (Oct 4, 2012)

*Albéniz?*

I would like to suggest Issac Albéniz.

Some of his piano music from the 1880's, _i. e. Suite española_, seems to pave the way to the music of Debussy.


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## Guest (Dec 2, 2013)

TalkingHead said:


> I might argue that truly modern music started with tape composition - a genre that no longer relied on 5-ledger line notation or indeed on conventional musical instruments to mediate the composer's instructions.


I would agree, were it not for Cage pieces from the thirties and forties, which also do not rely on ledger lines or conventional musical instruments.

But then, I would divide the century up into two eras, the one starting in 1906 (my sources give 1906 for the Ives) and the next one starting in 1939 (with Cage's Imaginary Landscape nr. 1).

I don't put those two pieces up as the defining pieces of the century, but as the defining pieces of the century _as I understand it._ As per the OP.

But having said that, I must say I'm intrigued by the Albeniz idea. I haven't listened to any Albeniz in a long time. Any pieces in particular that illustrate that thesis?

Anyway, to reiterate, in the twentieth century as heard by me, the whole harmonic thing does not loom so large. Harmonic advances had been happening from day dot. Indeed, harmonic advances are built in to the whole idea of tonality. It carried, as someone has put it (possibly me), the seeds of its own destruction. The whole logic of tonality is to go and go and go until there's no place left (other than repeats). And history has shown that to be exactly true.

And I advance myself only because I was a person who came to the century without any preconceptions (predilections, sure) and without any sense that what I was hearing was wrong or bad or mistaken. Quite the contrary. At the very worst, it was simply something I was not ready for yet. As per Berio's _Visage,_ for instance. Which I find delightful nowadays. But back in the day, it was _Thema (Omaggio a Joyce)_ for me. But otherwise, it was simply delightful, much like my first hearing of classical music as such. (That is, as something other than in a Warner Bros. cartoon or in a Hollywood movie.)

In my twentieth century, Schoenberg and the like are certainly present, but overshadowed by the contributions of Ives and Kurt Schwitters and Walter Ruttmann and Edgard Varese. And so too are the contributions of M. Boulez and company. Overshadowed by Paul Ignaz and John Cage and Luc Ferrari.

And in my twentieth century, the previous mentions notwithstanding, there's a whole other gender present. Mamlock, Oliveros, Knowles, Galas, Ferreyra, Ustvolskaya. And so forth.

Makes me want to stop this post dead in its tracks and go listen to some music.


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