hello and welcome to today's episode of piano tv where we are gonna go off the deep end and talk about modernism in music so modernism is a movement that happened in the early 1900s basically between 1900 and 1930 and it run it ran concurrently to impressionism and music we've actually already done a video about impressionism if you want to check that out because they're they're both pretty different um styles so modernism is like i don't want to give too much weight because we're going to talk about this in a second but it's a very abstract style you had composers like stravinsky and mahler and some of those really boundary pushing intense um strange composers so what we're going to be talking about today are the key musical components of the modernist era as well as the genres that developed and involved in this period such as ballet and symphonies we're also going to touch on the neoclassical movement which was sort of interlinked with the modernism movement it gets a little convoluted once we start getting past 1900 but i'll do my best to make it make sense anyway let's get started [Music] in music history things were pretty clear-cut for a while you had the middle ages the renaissance the baroque classical and romantic eras and each of them had their own set of really distinct styles and composers but once we hit the 1900s everything changed western music which sort of started out as one unbroken string began to fray into a bunch of smaller strings and on the screen i just have like a very small handful of them more started happening more started to change and all of it changed more quickly than it ever had and because of that i can't do a blanket video for the modern era the way i did sort of like blanket videos for other arrows like the baroque and romantic and so on since the modern era is so full of little subsets each of them are more or less entirely worthy of their own video that so we can focus on them we've already done a video on impressionism and today we're going to be kind of looking at modernism impressionism and modernism in music sort of ran parallel in terms of time periods but they're incredibly different in terms of style so you can check out the impressionism video if you want to get a little more details but it was all about like abstraction and creating moods and it's very atmospheric whereas modernism it was all about defying convention to like the extreme degree so one example is that modernist music often rejects tonality so that that just means like it's music that isn't anchored in a key and so it always gives us this feeling of being unsettled or just kind of off sounding modernist music sometimes rejects standard rhythmic meters as well so i mean you'll see less four four and three four or you'll see pieces that alternate different time signatures all the time they're never kind of resting in a time signature basically it's music that considers the borders of key and rhythm like too stifling doesn't even doesn't even push boundaries it destroys boundaries one way that you could describe modernism is an obvious point of historical discontinuity uh profound historical transformation so if we were to search for a name to convey the breakaway mood of the 1890s which is a mood symbolized musically by the opening bars of strauss's don juan but without imposing a fictitious unity of style on the age we could do worse than reverts or herman barr's term modernism and speak of a stylistically open-ended modernist music extending from around 1890 to the beginnings of our own 20th century modern music in 1910 and some of the pieces we're going to look at today extend beyond 1910 as well another way that you could define it is the the dissolution of the traditional tonality and transformation of the very foundations of tonal language so you have things like atonalism polytonalism other altered tonality et cetera et cetera so basically music that defies key signatures so probably the most important and obvious quality of modernism is atonality i've already said the word like 10 times and this video has barely even begun so basically we've already talked about this it's a lack of a tonal center it was a term that was first used in the early 1900s to describe music with like ambiguous chords more unusual melodies and rhythms this is a style of playing that was innovated by arnold schoenberg who we're going to talk about shortly here he was a jewish composer from vienna so what i have up on the screen here is a really specific type of atonality it's called 12-tone technique we won't really get into it but i just want to give you perspective on how like heady and kind of intellectual almost at the scott basically it was a way of writing that would give all 12 notes on the keyboard or like whatever instrument you're playing equal weight so you're not playing the same note more than you know once so you'll you'll notice in this pattern of twelve notes one two three five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve um nothing is repeated so if you have a b flat over here you don't have a b flat anywhere else until we repeat the cycle again so that's kind of how 12-tone technique worked it was a way of writing so that you never felt like you were in a key signature because even if you played like this b-flat one extra time you might start to hear that you're in the key of b-flat so it was a way of keeping things really ambiguous and it does it does get a little more in depth than that but i mean we don't we don't need to that could be a whole other really strange video arnold schoenberg's piano concerto opus 42 is a really good example of this it was composed in 1942 so it is one of his later works um written when he lived in america but again i think it's a really good example where you should be able to hear like the extreme dissonance and actually stravinsky um who's another popular composer that we're going to talk about today he actually criticized the piano writing of this concerto and another person who who criticized it is mitsuko uchida who's a famous piano performer and they said that schoenberg wasn't very good at piano and because of that he actually didn't write very effectively or very comfortably for piano so anyway criticisms aside let's take a listen to the opening sounds of this concert dome so you can truly get a feel for how weird it is i i feel like i'm setting you up for failure by telling you it's so weird but you'll know what i mean like it's really abstract especially compared to the music that most of us listen to regularly [Music] in nazi germany atonal music was actually labeled as degenerate and composers who wrote these pieces had their pieces banned so schoenberg at this time was already living in america it's also worth noting that schoenberg was a really influential teacher and composer so schoenberg along with his contemporaries and his students made up a group of composers in vienna known as the second viennese school just kind of fun fact the original vienna school was the really awesome cool guys mozart haydn and beethoven so anyway they were active in vienna between 1903 and 1925 and their music evolved from like a little atonal a little weird to like full-fledged daytona and then the eventual use of the 12-tone technique so some of the well-known composers in this school would be albin berg anton weber and obviously um schoenberg and many others igor stravinsky was a russian composer born into a musical family in 1882 and he's particularly known for the music of three really potent ballets which are firebird petrushka and the rite of spring so we're going to be talking about his ballet patrushka today which is a really great example of modernist rhythm styles irregular meters irregular rhythms and like more of a driving rhythm in general so when i say irregular meter basically i mean any rhythm that alternates so each bar well or like every several bars might have a different time signature like basically it's not going to be like four for the entire piece it's going to be more flexible it's going to alternate and just while we're on the subject of rhythm in the modernist era i wanted to mention polymeter even though we're not going to specifically listen for this and stravinsky's petrushka it's a really unusual technique but it's something you might come across basically the idea of having two different instruments do different time signatures so maybe like in this case the this is a really simple example but maybe the violin is playing a five-four beat and then the piano let's pretend this is a piano it's doing a 4-4 beat and they're going to align in different ways and it creates a really unusual effect as you might imagine aside from stravinsky bending rhythms you can also hear how orchestration was evolving in this period there was more percussion like the xylophone was added more drums and more of a rhythmic backbone we're not going to be hearing that in this specific example but if you look uh if you start listening to some modernist music you can really get a sense of like how how epic and powerful the drums are in this time so i'm going to show you a little bit of a part from the second movement of patrushka and instead of listening to the full orchestral version i've actually found us a clip that is a piano duet for four so forehand piano because i feel like it's easier to note the meter changes in the sheet music it's easier to follow along and really like hear well i mean it sounds really weird and abstract in the symfony version too but i just feel like it's easier to pinpoint these concepts so let's take a listen [Music] in the hands of gustav mahler the symphony transformed into an even larger beast like in the romantic era it was already a huge expansive symphony but he just like took it and ran so his eighth symphony from 1906 for example is nicknamed the symphony of a thousand because the sheer number of vocalists involved which two soprano also ten are based choirs there was a children's choir there were eight soloists so i mean not quite a thousand but a lot of people singing another example of his like huge scope of writing was his third symphony which is over an hour and a half long and a lot of its symphonies were very involved mahler along with some of his contemporaries was set to compose symphonies that were extraordinary in scope richness originality and urgency of expression mauler's music can be thought of as a link between the late romantic composers such as wagner to the modernist composers such as schoenberg there's a lot more traditional musicality in it even though you can kind of tell it's leaning in that modernist direction so we're going to be taking a quick listen to the fourth movement from his fifth symphony it's a very slow beautiful movement that he um apparently wrote for his wife it's kind of romantic and it can be described as a conventional symphony by an unconventional composer let's have a listen [Music] between the two world wars some composers wanted to get back into the balanced and ordered style of classical music i mean music had become really formless and abstract by this point so there was a counter movement to give that give it form again so some composers who wrote music in this genre i say in air quotes you can't see my hand uh it would be stravinsky kindemouth and saty so right now we're going to be taking a listen to francis poulink's concert sean petra did i get it did i get it my french friends anyway it's a harpsichord concerto written between 1927 and 1928 and i think it's a really cool concerto for a lot of reasons like first of all you have the small sound of the harpsichord which is the feature instrument up against a full orchestra which creates this really cool contrast and then you also have the fact that the feature instrument is a harpsichord which is a direct and obvious callback to the baroque period and it wasn't a popular instrument at the time but it sort of gained a little ground in baroque revitalists so as such this is a really great example of neoclassical writing although you could get even more specific and label it neo baroque writing basically the idea is the same like mixing the old with the new a little bit of a throwback to older times and like a more clear-cut music style so i'm not going to leave you with a clip for this one just because i don't have access to one but i'll leave you with a link to a performance of this concerto which you should definitely check out because harpsichords are just really um neat instruments so let's take a listen to that um i'll let ya i'll leave it up there you can go do it yourself and i'll wait or you can do it after this video because this video is almost over and that is all for today's tour through the modernist era a really kind of unique and interesting thread of musical history if you like this history video you'll probably like some of our other similar ones we've actually gone through a lot of the major ones we've already talked about the baroque period the romantic period the classical period and we've talked about impressionism as well so i really like doing these videos i i think history is fascinating and if you're learning pieces by schoenberg if you're learning pieces by you know stravinsky or any any of these people it really helps to understand the context in which the music was written so without further ado i will catch you guys in the next video so schoenberg at this time was already living in america so i guess he wasn't banned or was he