Thinking about the Twentieth Century

Abstract

The presence of essays on Hans Pfitzner and on Béla Bartók’s collaboration with Benny Goodman in this issue of MQ once again raises the question of how we choose to construct the history of classical and concert music in the twentieth century. Few eras in the history of music have bequeathed to historians such intense controversy over competing contemporaneous trends as the first four decades of the last century. Writing and reading about music were thriving enterprises between the mid-1890s and 1939, the decades during which the nineteenth century came to a close. Disparate trends in art emerged, each overtly committed to charting a new direction adequate to a self-consciously modern age, one seemingly discontinuous with the past in an unprecedented way. Spurred on in part by highly visible contemporary departures from nineteenth-century practices in painting, sculpture, and architecture, composers wrote music surrounded by intense debates over ideas of continuity, evolutionary change, revolution, and their counterparts: ideologies of restoration and reaction to perceived radical threats to hallowed traditions, including the discovery of ethnic and national authenticities in rural premodern folk music. The role of jazz in concert and classical music in the twentieth century was shaped by debates about whether art could or should be progressive and aligned with history, or whether it was properly governed by normative philosophical claims about beauty. The new century, with its spread of literacy, brought concerns about for whom one might be writing music for in an age of mass communication. The scale of the potential audience eclipsed the significance of the patronage of a landed aristocracy and captains of industry.