Anton Webern (1883−1945)
Webern was one of the three principal composers of the Second Viennese School. Probably Arnold Schoenberg’s first private pupil and a devoted lifelong friend, he…
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Music Subject Overview
Musical modernism is understood here in the broadest sense, including compositional practices from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Of course, modernist practice is…
Intellectual Currents
This section focusses on the historical, sociological, philosophical, economic, political, and scientific context of modernism. Entries cover individuals, coteries, movements, and events. The primary criterion…
Expressionism
Expressionism was one of the foremost modernist movements to emerge in Europe in the early years of the twentieth-century. It had a profound effect on…
Jewish art music
Modern Jewish art music concerns the study of Jewish musical markers and extra-musical Jewish topoi in twentieth-century music penned by both Jews and non-Jews. Transcending…
Maeterlinck, Maurice (1862–1949)
Maurice Maeterlinck was a Flemish francophone writer, who spent most of his life in France and whose prolific oeuvre entails poetry, plays, and essays. In…
Lutyens, Elisabeth (1906–1983)
(Agnes) Elisabeth Lutyens, CBE, was an English composer, credited with helping to establish the twelve-tone method of serialism in Britain. Lutyens’s first major composition using…
Krenek, Ernst (1900–1991)
Ernst Krenek, twentieth-century composer, was born in Vienna in 1900. Krenek composed over 240 works from 1917 until 1989, and his career includes works in…
Paik, Nam June (1932–2006)
Nam June Paik was a Korean-born American artist who achieved international notoriety for his destructive, neo-dada activities and visionary, esthetic experiments with electronic media. Born…
Mahler, Gustav (1860–1911)
With his deeply autobiographical compositions, composer Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) bridged late nineteenth-century Romanticism and early twentieth-century Modernism. His symphonies and song cycles traversed techniques of…
Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund (1903–69)
Born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund to an Italian Catholic mother and an assimilated Jewish father, Adorno would take his mother’s vaguely aristocratic last name. Philosopher, aesthetician,…
Atonality
Atonality refers to the complete absence of tonality in a musical composition. In music, it is often claimed that modernism stands in opposition to classicism…
Kraus, Karl (1874–1936)
Karl Kraus was a famous literary and cultural critic and a cult figure in Vienna’s intellectual scene around 1900. He was the editor of the…
John Cage (1921–1990)
A leading figure in the twentieth-century avant-garde, John Cage was a prolific composer, writer, and artist. His early works show Schoenberg’s influence in their use…
Kolisch, Rudolf (1896–1978)
Rudolf Kolisch was an Austrian-born violinist, teacher, and conductor. As leader of the Kolisch Quartet he premiered many important chamber works by the Second Viennese…
Zorn, John (1953--)
John Zorn is an American avant-garde saxophonist and composer. Zorn performs on alto saxophone and is one of the leading figures in New York City’s…
Honegger, Arthur (1892–1955)
Composer Arthur Honegger was one of a group of six young French composers, known as Les Six, in the forefront of post-WWI Parisian musical modernism.…
Berg, Alban
Composer Alban Berg (1885–1935) is best-known for his two operas, Wozzeck (premiered 1925) and Lulu (left unfinished but performed in incomplete form until the full…
Gandini, Gerardo (1936–2013)
Gerardo Gandini was an Argentinean composer and pianist. Disciple and assistant of Alberto Ginastera in the late 1950s and 1960s, he obtained international recognition for…
Serialism/Twelve-Tone Technique
Serialism or the twelve-tone technique is a way of composing music that involves replacing major and minor scales with a fixed ordering of the pitches…
Black Mountain College
Between 1933 and 1957, Black Mountain College served as an unlikely crucible of modernism. Despite its isolated location near Asheville, North Carolina, at various times…
Stockhausen, Karlheinz (1928–2007)
For much of the 1950s and 1960s, the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was an absolutely seminal figure within the European avant-garde. By the mid-1950s, every…
Synaesthesia
Synaesthesia is the confusion or conflation of sensory modalities, where one sense is experienced or described in terms of another as in Charles Baudelaire’s simile…
Weill, Kurt (1900–1950)
Kurt Weill was one of the most inventive and prominent composers for musical theatre during the first half of the twentieth century. He wrote for…
Paz, Juan Carlos (1897–1972)
Juan Carlos Paz (1897–1972) was an Argentine composer, critic, writer, and self-described “compositional guide” who played a key role in twentieth-century Argentine contemporary music. Known…