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Instructor: John Schauer
Publications Editor for the Ravinia Festival
Now that the
20th century is behind us, it will be interesting to see how our
perceptions of the music of the last 100 years will change. Perhaps
future music historians will no longer lump all of the last 100
years together. The term "20th-century music" to many
connotes something avant-garde, highly dissonant or atonal, giving
expression to feelings of angst and anxiety; yet the first decade
of the 1900s saw the premieres of such Romantic-sounding masterworks
as Puccini’s Tosca and Madama Butterfly, Rachmaninoff’s
Second Piano Concerto, Sibelius’s Second Symphony, Lehár’s
The Merry Widow, Mahler’s eighth and ninth symphonies
and Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.
Of course more
"progressive"-sounding works were also appearing during
that same time: Debussy’s La Mer, Richard Strauss’s
Salome and Elektra, Janacek’s Jenufa and
Schoenberg’s Three Piano Pieces, Op. 11. A crack was starting
to appear in the façade of classical music, and the division
between traditional and more innovative compositional styles was
becoming more apparent. The first few years after 1910 saw the premieres
of such sugary operettas as Victor Herbert’s Naughty Marietta
and Sweethearts as well as Puccini’s Girl of the
Golden West, Massenet’s Don Quichotte, R. Strauss’s
Der Rosenkavalier, and Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloe.
In marked contrast were such audience-challenging works as Schoenberg’s
Pierrot Lunaire and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring,
which actually triggered riots at its 1913 premiere in Paris and
was dubbed by Debussy "a beautiful nightmare."
This same fragmenting
process was happening throughout the realm of music, as sub-categories
began to fracture further. A new current was blowing through the
relatively new realm of popular music: Irving Berlin’s "Alexander’s
Ragtime Band" was published in 1911, and by 1917 the first
recordings of a new music called jazz were sweeping the United States.
(It was the great American composer George Gershwin who would be
the first to wed jazz with symphonic music.) It was as if the great
flow of the Western art music tradition were fragmenting into numerous
branches, like a mighty river before it flows into the sea. It was
a process that would occur with greater and greater frequency as
the century progressed.
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