| Periods of Western art music | |
|---|---|
| Early | |
| Medieval | (500–1400) |
| Renaissance | (1400–1600) |
| Baroque | (1600–1760) |
| Common practice | |
| Baroque | (1600–1760) |
| Classical | (1750–1830) |
| Romantic | (1815–1910) |
| Modern and contemporary | |
| 20th century | (1900–2000) |
| Contemporary | (1975–present) |
| 21st century | (2000–present) |
Modernism in music is characterized by a desire for or belief in progress and science, surrealism, anti-romanticism, political advocacy, general intellectualism, and/or a breaking with the past or common practice.
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Musicologist Carl Dahlhaus restricted his definition of musical modernism to progressive music in the period 1890–1910:
The year 1890...lends itself as an obvious point of historical discontinuity....The "breakthrough" Mahler, Strauss and Debussy implying a profound historical transformation....If we were to search for a name to convey the breakaway mood of the 1890s (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 revert to [the] term "modernism" extending (with some latitude) from the 1890 to the beginnings of our own twentieth-century modern music in 1910....The label "late romanticism"...is a terminological blunder of the first order and ought to be abandoned forthwith. It is absurd to yoke Strauss, Mahler, and the young Schoenberg, composers who represent modernism in the minds of their turn-of-the-century contemporaries, with the self-proclaimed anti-modernist Pfitzner, calling them all "late romantics" in order to supply a veneer of internal unity to an age fraught with stylistic contradictions and conflicts. (Dahlhaus 1989, 334)
Leon Botstein, on the other hand, asserts that musical modernism is characterized by "a conception of modernity dominated by the progress of science, technology and industry, and by positivism, mechanization, urbanization, mass culture and nationalism", an aesthetic reaction to which "reflected not only enthusiasm but ambivalence and anxiety" (Botstein 2007).
Other writers regard the period of musical modernism as extending from about 1890 to only 1930, and apply the term "postmodernism" to the period after that year (Karolyi 1994, 135; Meyer 1994, 331–32).
Still other writers assert that modernism is not attached to any historical period, but rather is "an attitude of the composer; a living construct that can evolve with the times" (McHard 2008, 14).
In the 1910s, futurists such as Luigi Russolo looked to a future of music liberated to the point of being able to use any sound, even "noises" such as factory and mechanical sounds (Russolo, "The Art of Noises"), while Edgard Varèse created his Poème électronique specifically for the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair with 400 speakers, designed by Le Corbusier with the assistance of Iannis Xenakis (EMF Institute article "Poème électronique").
John Cage and Lou Harrison wrote works in the late 1940s for percussion orchestra. Harrison later wrote for and built gamelans, while Cage popularized extended techniques on the piano in his prepared piano pieces, starting in 1938 (Stephen Drury, "In a Landscape") Starting in the early 1920s, Harry Partch built his own ensemble of instruments, mostly percussion and string instruments, to allow the performance of his theatrical ("corporeal") justly tuned microtonal music (Partch biography page at harrypartch.com).
Atonality, the twelve tone technique, polytonality, tone clusters, dissonant counterpoint, and serialism.
Stanley Cavell describes the "burden of modernism" as caused by a situation wherein the "procedures and problems it now seems necessary to composers to employ and confront to make a work of art at all themselves insure that their work will not be comprehensible to an audience" (Cavell 1976, 187).
Brian Ferneyhough coined the neologisms "too-muchness" and "too-littleness" to describe the poles between which writings about aesthetic perception tend to swing (Ferneyhough 1995, 117).