Early Modernist Music

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292 members| 26 shouts

Leader: alleseter
Join Policy: Open
Created on: 29 Nov 2005
Description:
For lovers of that period of classical music defined as musical modernism, ca. 1880-1930, when the boundaries of traditional harmony and form were broken.

Welcome to Early Modernist Music Group!

05-21-08
Defining musical modernism: Modernism in music, characterized by a desire for or belief in breaking with the past or common practice as applied to music. Ezra Pound’s modernist slogan, “Make it new” as applied to music. Musicologist Carl Dahlhaus restricted his definition of musical modernism to progressive music in the period 1890-1910: The year 1890…lends itself as an obvious point of historical discontinuity…The “breakthrough” of Mahler, Strauss, and Debussy implies a profound historical transformation. Other writers regard the period of musical modernism as extending only to about 1930, and apply the term “postmodernism” to the period after that year (Karolyi 1994, 135: Meyer 1994, 331-32)(Wikipedia)

This group was created by Findoctor in 2005 and revitalized by Gamester in 2008.

group avatar: Black and Violet (1924) by Wassily Kandinsky

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  • Retinend

    "Connected Artists" is strange to me. A lot of avant-gardists working from past the 1920s. Shouldn't those just be considered plain "Modernist"? Personally I like music I call "Early Modernist" because it's not Romantic (excessive) and not Modernist (excessive), but nicely in between. Faure, Debussy, Delius and similar. Happy to be corrected in my understanding of this. I'm not taught in music history.

    April 2012

  • alleseter

    There's a nice article on The Rite of Spring on the AllmusicGuide: http://blog.allmusic.com/2009/3/27/augurs-of-spring-some-anecdotes-of-stravinskys-le-sacre-du-printemps/

    April 2009

  • Qimen

    Happy year 2009 to you !

    January 2009

  • alleseter

    A happy new year to you all!

    January 2009

  • SirAlecHendrix

    good response

    December 2008

  • alleseter

    (part 2): Respighi, Vaughan Williams, Holst and De Falla were clearly inspired by the then still modern impressionism of Debussy and Ravel. In Holst's Mars one can clearly hear in the inspiration of The Rite of Spring, Vaughan-Williams's 4th and 6th symphonies are full of expressionism. and the Chôros series by Villa-Lobos is strikingly modern, at times verging on the edge of noisy expressionism. In my opinion neo-classicism and 'neue sachlichkeit' (De Falla, Villa-Lobos), too are definitely anti-romantic and thus modern, if not as avant-garde as dodecafonism or Varèse's experiments. The only dubious artists may be Reger and Pfitzner, but before say 1905 they were as modern as music got at the time (when Wagner still was the main source of the avant-garde in Germany and Austria). Only afterwards, they got outdated.

    December 2008

  • alleseter

    It's true that some of the connected artists are not the avant-garde modernists themselves, but their contemporaries. I've chosen to connect all composers of an era, not only the pioneers, but also the followers. Yet, all the artists you mentioned definitely belong to the early 20th century, musically.

    December 2008

  • SirAlecHendrix

    i came to realize that some of the connected composers aren't what we would call modernists but neo-romanicists and neo-classicists who rejected avant-garde modernism (e.g. Ralph Vaughan Williams, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Ottorini Respighi, Manuel de Falla, Gustav Holst, etc.). Hans Pfitzner was a self-described anti-modernist, and i guess, Max Reger never had any contact with modernism ...

    December 2008

  • SirAlecHendrix

    we don't need to care about 'Overall' group charts, it's only a distraction. important is 'Unique to this Group' (unfortunately not default on last.fm), because it's the shuffle list for the group radio, and today it reads : 1 Igor Stravinsky 2 Maurice Ravel 3 Johann Sebastian Bach 4 Franz Schubert 5 Dmitri Shostakovich 6 Jean Sibelius 7 Erik Satie 8 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 9 Olivier Messiaen 10 Johannes Brahms

    November 2008

  • howardiyoung

    The Beatles are at number 1, I find that to be trivially distressing

    July 2008

  • alleseter

    you're totally right! I've changed it

    June 2008

  • alleseter

    Thanx! No brandy or cigars, though... :-D

    June 2008

  • howardiyoung

    Does the leader get brandy and cigars?

    June 2008

  • joachimp

    Does anyone else think it's kinda ironic that the top artist is J.S. Bach?

    May 2008

  • howardiyoung

    Leaderless. Interesting. ..Where do I Join

    January 2008

  • alleseter

    Unfortunately, this group is practically leaderless. Findoctor has not be seen on last.fm since early 2006. :-(

    January 2008

  • sorelka

    Thank you for creating such a perfect group.... It gives me a chance to express my love for classical music of that period.

    December 2007

  • UnrealHari

    Test your musical skills: http://www.jakemandell.com/tonedeaf/

    July 2007

  • UnrealHari

    Do you want to be a Neomodernist? Join our group The Neomodernists. http://www.last.fm/group/The+Neomodernists/connections

    April 2007

  • Ahamprema

    I think this period defined differences among romantics and new serialists following the serialist style with Webern and Alban Berg

    March 2007
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