Chapter 9: Modernism and the Shattering of Tonal Harmony

The first decades of the 20th century witnessed a musical revolution as radical as the upheavals in painting (Cubism, abstraction) and literature (stream of consciousness). Composers deliberately abandoned the tonal system that had organized Western music for 300 years, searching for new expressive languages adequate to a world transformed by industrialization, war, and psychological discovery.

Stravinsky and Rhythmic Revolution

Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) caused the most famous riot in musical history with The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du Printemps), premiered by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Paris on May 29, 1913. The ballet depicted a pagan sacrifice—a young girl dances herself to death to appease the god of spring. The music’s polyrhythm, polytonality, pounding ostinati, and brutal dissonances were unlike anything audiences had heard. A brawl broke out in the audience; police were called.

Stravinsky moved through several stylistic periods: Russian nationalism (The Firebird, 1910), Neoclassicism (returning to 18th-century forms with ironic modern twists—Pulcinella, Oedipus Rex), and finally Serialism late in life.

Schoenberg and Atonality

Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) took the logical step that Wagnerian chromaticism implied: the complete abandonment of tonal centers, creating atonal music. His Three Piano Pieces (Op. 11, 1909) and Pierrot Lunaire (1912)—a song cycle for singer using Sprechstimme (speech-song)—established atonality as a viable language.

To bring order to atonal composition, Schoenberg developed twelve-tone technique (dodecaphony): a method in which all 12 pitches of the chromatic scale are arranged into a tone row, which is then used in its original form, retrograde, inversion, and retrograde-inversion. This system gave composers rigorous control without tonal hierarchy.

His pupils Alban Berg and Anton Webern took serialism in different directions: Berg retained emotional expressiveness (Violin Concerto, Wozzeck); Webern pursued extreme brevity and pointillist texture.

Bartók and Folk Music

Béla Bartók (1881–1945) found a different path to modernism: through folk music. He traveled through Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and North Africa with a phonograph, recording thousands of folk melodies, and incorporated their irregular rhythms, modal scales, and raw energy into his compositions. His string quartets, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, and Concerto for Orchestra synthesize folk vitality with 20th-century harmonic language.

Composer	Approach	Key Work
Stravinsky	Rhythmic/polyrhythmic	Rite of Spring (1913)
Schoenberg	Atonality, 12-tone	Pierrot Lunaire (1912)
Berg	Expressive serialism	Violin Concerto, Wozzeck
Webern	Pointillism, brevity	Symphony Op. 21
Bartók	Folk + modernism	String Quartets

Key Checklist

• Describe what made The Rite of Spring so shocking to its 1913 audience
• Explain twelve-tone technique and the concept of the tone row
• Contrast Bartók’s approach to modernism with Schoenberg’s