1. Chapter 19 Prelude: Music and Modernism
Music before
World War I

2. Key Terms Pentatonic scale Whole-tone scale Octatonic scale
Quarter-tone scale
“The emancipation of dissonance”
Atonality

3. Music before World War I
Music had always been more abstract
No equivalent to representation in painting or word meanings (reference) in poetry
But it did have a traditional “internal logic” – ways of using tune, motive, harmony, tonality, tone color, & rhythm
Music of Bach, Beethoven, & Brahms was based on this “logic” – common-practice era
Avant-garde music moved away from this norm
Worked out new principles based on new uses of melody, harmony, & tonality

4. Experiment and Transformation: Melody (1)
Wagner’s vocal lines not very tuneful
Mahler used distortion in folk-like tunes
Long, intricate melodies of his late works use large leaps as they surge, swoop, & yearn
Schoenberg melodies more complex yet
An exaggerated version of late Mahler

5. Experiment and Transformation: Melody (2)
Debussy used shadowy motives
Suggestion of melody without clear tunes
Stravinsky borrowed Russian folk songs
Whittled them down into brief fragments

6. New Horizons, New Scales (1)
Influence of 1889 Paris world’s fair
African masks influenced Picasso
Debussy heard Balinese gamelan music
Awareness of other scales began to grow
New scales affected harmony & tonality
Fresh new sounds available
Ended the stranglehold of diatonic scales

7. New Horizons, New Scales (2)
Debussy used whole-tone & pentatonic scales
Stravinsky used octatonic scales
Ives used the quarter-tone scale

8. “The Emancipation of Dissonance”
Harmony arose to support melody
But melodies now more complex & vague
Harmony naturally became more dissonant
Dissonances were meant to resolve
But resolutions were delayed longer & longer
Degrees of consonance, dissonance emerged
Harsh dissonances could resolve to mild ones
Schoenberg announced “the emancipation of the dissonance” – dissonances could be used for their unique sound without need to resolve

9. Tonality and Atonality (1)
Tonality arose to anchor melody, harmony
But melody grew more complex, fragmented
And harmony grew more dissonant, chromatic
As a result, tonality grew weak & indistinct

10. Tonality and Atonality (2)
Some composers began to write atonal music
Music without any tonal center
As with consonance & dissonance, degrees of tonality & atonality emerged
Wagner’s chromaticism once seemed atonal, and while he moved music closer to atonality, now we can hear its tonal references

11. Conclusion Melody, harmony, tonality Joint emancipation of all three
The “holy trinity” of music
All are closely related & work together
Joint emancipation of all three
Central style characteristic of the first phase of 20th century avant-garde music