Leon Botstein asserts that musical modernism is characterized by “a conception of modernity dominated by the progress of science, technology and industry, and by positivism, mechanization, urbanization, mass culture and nationalism”, an aesthetic reaction to which “reflected not only enthusiasm but ambivalence and anxiety."

Modernism in music is characterized by a desire for or belief in progress and science, surrealism, anti-romanticism, political advocacy, general intellectualism, and/or a breaking with the past or common practice — Ezra Pound’s modernist slogan, “Make it new,” as applied to music. Modern music is often thought to begin with, or just after, Debussy’s impressionist works, rising to rhetorical, if not commercial, dominance after World War Two, and then being gradually displaced by postmodern music. The musical branch of the larger modernist movement that overtook the art world during the first half of the twentieth century, the modern period is widely thought to roughly occupy the time between 1890 and 1945.