Music Teacher July 20161

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Jonathan James is a freelance music educator who lectures around the UK and leads workshops for professional orchestras. He was head of performing arts and director of music at a FE college for six years and has since delivered a variety of teacher training events and courses.

Ways into modernism

by Jonathan James

WHY EARLY MODERNISM?

The seismic shifts in the art world at the turn of the last century (around 1890 to 1920) provoked some of the

most exciting breakthroughs in the history of music. To look at the works of Debussy, Stravinsky, Schoenberg

and other iconoclasts is to look at the fundamental questions of what music is, at how we engage with it, and

what its purpose is, both artistically and socially.

This resource is designed around how to ask those questions in a way that encourages exploration both during

term-time and the holiday period. It should also open up the following, more specific areas of study, expanding

terminology and contextual awareness for both 20th-century set works and unseen excerpts:

Board Areas Components

Edexcel Composition 2.1 Composing brief related to area of study, ‘New Directions’

Edexcel Appraising 3.1 ‘Fusions’: Debussy Estampes 1&23.1 ‘New Directions’: Cage, Saariaho, Stravinsky

AQA Appraising 3.1.8 (A2) Art music since 1910: Shostakovich, Messiaen, Reich, MacMillan

OCR Historical studies 3.3 and 3.6 Historical and Analytical studies in Music

The aim is to give ideas on how to deliver an overview of the developments at the turn of the century,

accompanying each main learning point with practical exercises, and culminating in a three-hour sample

session plan.

This is a not an extended factsheet on modernism, nor a study of new set works, but rather a series of ideas

on how to access modern music in a way that connects with the A level learner.

WHAT IS MODERNISM?

Most textbook definitions start by putting modernism in opposition to aesthetic movements that either preceded

it or that ran contemporaneously, such as late Romanticism, bourgeois realism or naturalism, the decadence

of ‘la belle époque’ or the corseted thinking of Victorianism. Modernism is characterised here as a bracing

smack in the face of convention, a dramatic reaction against anything that sought to bind an art form to the

rulebook of the past.

As a movement that is more about posing questions than arriving at answers, a good way of starting the

process of definition in the classroom is through deductive reasoning. By playing two late Romantic works

and one early Expressionist one, you can immediately start getting away from obvious definitions of style and

pilot the learning instead into less charted territory: that intersection between expressive Romanticism and

Romantic Expressionism.

‘What is needed above all is an scepticism towards all inherited concepts.’ Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1901.

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The aim is to explore how elements of form, harmony and vertical organisation are already being ‘loosened’ in

these works, to the extent that some of the musical material already is starting to feel ‘modern’, straining at the

edges of tonality and resisting neat categorisation. Mahler wrote that he didn’t expect his symphonies to be

appreciated in his time, but had faith that they would suit later generations (Beethoven said the same about his

late string quartets). The spirit of the ‘modern’ is always present whatever the era, in the sense of being both

‘of the moment’ (from the Latin ‘modo’, ‘current’) and innovative, forward-looking.

So, although early modernism is often seen as a reaction against the past, the seeds of it were very much

present in music of the time – and certain strands of its development have grown organically from previous

thinking, rather than being defiant rejections or statements of opposition.

The final ‘reveal’ in this opening discussion is to point to the dates of composition for the three pieces above.

The most radical of the three, by Schoenberg, was composed at the cusp of the new century in 1899 (a fact

students might just remember from their GCSE studies), while the others were written a decade or two later

(Mahler’s Symphony No. 7 in 1909, and Sibelius’s Symphony No. 7 in 1924).

OPENING DISCUSSION IDEA

Without revealing anything about the pieces or their composers, play the class the following:

� Mahler Symphony No. 7, third movement

� Sibelius Symphony No. 7, opening section

� Schoenberg Verklärte Nacht, second section

Ask them to note their thoughts on the following as they listen:

� How easily can you follow the thread of the music?

� Is the music dominated by form or by gesture?

� How is dissonance treated?

� How complex is the texture, and how would you describe the organistion of ideas?

All of the excerpts refered to this resource are available on this Spotify playlist.

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SETTING THE SCENE: THE ARTISTIC CONTEXT FOR EARLY MODERNISMAsk your students to compare the following three paintings of snow and reflect on where they feel most

connected to the subject:

The first is a realistic representation, placing the viewer as an external observer, where form and balance can

be discerned. There is a foreground and background, a sweep to line of long grass leading the eye to the

distance.

Here we’ve telescoped in. Although it’s clear the picture is still about snow, it has been atomised into dancing

flakes, falling close to the viewer and evoking memories of what it’s like to be caught in a snowstorm. Rather

than giving a statement, it leaves us with an impression.

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Finally, the level of abstraction is at its furthest, giving an internal perception of snow, perhaps from the

perspective of a dream or nightmare. It’s snow as it leaves an imprint on our psyche.

This is a good way of talking about how the gaze of the viewer shifts from looking outside to looking deep

within, with the final ‘modernist’ work bringing the gaze onto our awareness of perception itself. Rather than

distancing the snow from the viewer, it offers a far more intimate connection with it.

It’s an effective strategy to take as your starting point the fact that modernist art offers a way into the psyche,

into the identity of both the artist and the listener, who thereby becomes more complicit in the work in the

process. It requires more of our imagination, more intellectual and emotional investment.

It is not surprising, then, that for such a subjective area – the journey into the subconscious – there was such

a diverse set of responses as the century turned. In fact, has there ever been such an impressive cluster of

‘-isms’ in the history of the arts? From primitivism and fauvism through to symbolism, absurdism, futurism and

dadaism, all mapping their own way through the world of instinct and dream, each guided by their own set of

questions.

Searching for a ‘correspondence of the senses’

Cross-disciplinary thinking is very much a feature of this time, where poets, musicians and painters intermingled

and discussed their artistic ideas. A famous example is the meeting of the ‘Tuesday-ers’ (‘Les Mardistes’) in

Paris, where Debussy, Verlaine, Rilke and other thinkers were brought together by symbolist poet Stéphane

Mallarmé every week to share their inspiration. Would Debussy’s so-called ‘Impressionist’ musical ideas have

taken the same dramatic shape without the linguistic freedom of the symbolist poets or the abstract Nocturnes

of Whistler?

THE SHIFTING GAZE OF MUSIC

As you show these three images, play Debussy’s ‘The Snow is Dancing’ from his Children’s Corner suite. At first, the gentle fall of snow is obvious in the staccato descending scales, the equivalent of a Romantic landscape. Then the listener is pulled in to the mind of the little girl observing the snow at night, and into her fear as she makes out ghoulish shapes in the flurries of white (1:10 on the Spotify recording, a repeated-note motif that then falls, given out first by the right hand and answered by the left).

‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY’ AS A MUSICAL PAINTING

To make these movements more relevant to the learner, you could ask them to either improvise or compose a quick response to each artistic strand. What does a fauvist image sound like compared to a surrealist one? Can they imagine reducing music to the same bold shapes and blunt gestures of an early Picasso piece of cubism? Could they play ‘Happy Birthday’ in all those different styles?

When working on their AS/A2 composition, how much do students draw on the inspiration of other art forms and ideas?

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This deliberate cross-fertilisation was also motivated by the central precept of the writer Baudelaire as he tried,

in his poetry, to achieve a ‘correspondence of the senses’. Ideas of music and sound belonged equally to his

choice of images as did visual ones, or those inspired by touch and smell.

Listening to early modernist works there is a similar invitation to free the senses, to listen with the inner eye, and

to imagine what it feels like to the touch.

Self-awareness and growing uncertainty

A good image to characterise the developments so far would be Adam and Eve:

Self-awareness, or rather the licence to express that self-awareness, is a core aspect of modernist thinking.

The exploration of the psyche is a natural response to this stimulus. The question then was how to represent

that exploration in the world of the arts. In turn, this new subjective focus led to a reappraisal of previously

accepted artistic parameters. The dictates of the previous century regarding form, perspective and meaning

were all undermined by a fresh scepticism.

This scepticism allows less place for universal truths or religious adherence to received wisdom. Arguably,

fear in God was replaced by a more diffuse, less tangible fear: the fear of a godless world and the terrifying

potential for meaninglessness in our existence. A new ‘angst’ took grip.

� Aside from religion, what other inherited concepts in society and the arts would be challenged at the turn

of the century?

CREATIVE WRITING EXERCISE

Compare the opening of Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture to the opening of Debussy’s La mer. Ask students to write a free-flowing response to both excerpts, not worrying about syntax but rather focusing on images and sensations in a stream of consciousness. Refer to Baudelaire’s ‘correspondence of the senses’ and encourage them to think of smell and touch as well as the more obvious aural and visual images.

� Which piece invites the more interesting language, and why?

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� What are the parameters in music which, prompted by this new self-awareness, would now be dissected

and re-imagined?

Two tales of the city?

By the late 1800s, the Second Industrial Revolution was in full swing throughout Europe, creating an accelerated

urbanisation as mechanised modes of production took over from a rural economy. In the earlier half of the

century, writers such as Dickens, Zola and Balzac had used the city as a gritty backdrop for their novels, pitting

their main protagonists against the travails of surviving in London or Paris. The city here is portrayed as hostile,

its dwellers as heathen, without tradition or religion.

Later, in the early 1900s, Woolf, Joyce and Kafka took this theme further, looking at the psychological impact

of urban living on their characters, emphasising a sense of alienation from a society whose rules and codes of

living had become apparently more and more absurd.

Primitivism and fauvism – an escape to nature, in a sense – offered a release from the stresses and greyness of

the city. Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring is on one level an expression of that release, the equivalent of a naked

madman yelling at commuters in a packed street.

EXPLORING ANGST: A ROUTE TO SHOSTAKOVICH

What is the equivalent in music to The Scream, that iconic Expressionist image of modern angst by Edvard Munch? One way in to this question may be to analyse some aspects and functions of chromaticism and harmonic tension, starting with a late Romantic work and progressing through to 20th century.

In Wagner’s Prelude to Act 1 of Tristan and Isolde (1865), chromatic harmonies are famously used to express unfulfilled yearning and emotional turbulence. The music unfolds in a series of unresolved harmonic questions.

Compare this to the first movement of Bartók’s String Quartet No. 1 (1909). Here the chromatic harmonies and angular lines still bear a Romantic, Wagnerian influence while pointing to an inner angst, to a soul lost in a meaningless world. The movement starts in a bleak place, almost devoid of emotion, before becoming increasingly urgent and impassioned.

This example of early Bartók gives an interesting context from which to assess Shostakovich’s use of harmonic uncertainty as he expresses similar themes. In Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 3 (1946), he states in the programme notes that the final movements are a lament for the war dead, followed by the question ‘why, and for what?’.

Notice that, with both these Bartók and Shostakovich examples, the musical expression of a world stripped of obvious meaning may well start in a numbed, cold state – but crucially this is used to set up an increasingly enraged and emotionally charged response later (not unlike Munch’s The Scream).

This is particularly relevant to AQA 3.1.8: Art Music since 1910 – Shostakovich.

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By contrast, Futurist painters such as Boccioni, Russolo and Severini idolised the city, excited by its energy

and new technologies. This painting by Boccioni (The Dynamism of a Cyclist, 1913) is a typical treatment of

those themes, inspired by speed and physical prowess:

Russolo was one of the Italian futurist painters who also pioneered electronic art music in his attempts to

capture the sounds of the city, argued for most famously in his 1913 book The Art of Noises.

FUTURIST LISTENING EXERCISE: A ROUTE TO REICH

1) Play the students Russolo’s Awakening of a City (1913). � What are the ‘musical’ elements in these sequence of samples? Can phrases be discerned? Why do the

elements of sound complement each other? What are the links to current sampling techniques?

2) Then play Mosolov’s The Iron Foundry (1926), which represents a Soviet offshoot of the futurist movement. � Examine the strategic blocks of orchestral colour to depict the different stages of the factory machines

as they get started, wind up to full power and then suddenly break down.

� Note the harmonic stasis and rhythmic choices. Compare these to minimalist techniques.

� What is the tone of the piece: triumphant or threatening? Or both? Why?

3) Set the students the task of improvising a cityscape that combines elements of Russolo’s experimental

noise-art and Mosolov’s machine music.

4) Compare their response to the first movement of Reich’s Different Trains. This is a work from 1988 for

string quartet and tape that builds on his earlier experiments of phasing recorded samples (sirens and

speech in this case) against the backdrop of his signature brand of minimalist music. A later example for

further comparison is Reich’s City Life (1995) for mixed ensemble and two samplers, second and fourth

movements, which include samples of voice, alarms, mechanical tools, church bells and a heartbeat. � How does Reich connect the music to the sound samples in terms of pitch, rhythm and timbre?

EXPLORING COLOUR AND RHYTHM

The previous section set a context for early modernism both culturally and artistically by looking at key factors

that helped shift 19th-century aesthetic thinking into exciting new directions. In summary, the shifts resulted from

� turning the gaze inwards on the psyche.

� exploring connections between all of the senses.

� allowing a new self-awareness and a questioning of artistic parameters.

� giving way to existential doubt and a sense of angst.

� reacting to the impact of urbanisation and city life.

This section addresses how composers, as a result, recalibrated their approach to the building blocks of

colour and rhythm in their music. The two are interconnected, but it helps to isolate them to consider different

innovations.

This is particularly relevant to AQA 3.1.8 Art music since 1910 and Edexcel New Directions composition area of study: Experimental music.

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Implicit in the choice of colour will be issues of harmonic development and emancipation from tonality. However,

as Schoenberg did not start formalising his 12-note technique until later in the 1920s, the particular innovation

of serialism falls outside of the dates set for this resource (1890-1920).

Colour

Ever since the early Baroque, composers have enjoyed using different instrumental timbres to add dramatic

expression, whether conjuring up pastoral scenes on flutes and reeds, or depicting anger with agitated strings.

It wasn’t until the late 1800s, though, that the connections between visual arts, poetry and music were more

radically explored, in such a way that colour in itself could be separated out and elevated to being an organising

principle, something that informed not just the instrumentation of a piece, but also its form and content.

Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1894) made for an excellent starting point for this exploration

in previous syllabuses, right from the seductive opening flute solo through to the distant antique cymbals

with which it finishes. It certainly is a watershed moment in the orchestral repertoire, inspiring composers to

reconsider the possibilities for orchestral colour.

‘Pleasure is the law’ was Debussy’s motto. If a chord or sequence of harmonies in themselves were pleasing

to the ear, or stimulated an interesting image, then that would outweigh previous considerations of form and

theoretical rules. It was the equivalent of a symbolist poet eschewing metre and traditional prosody to riff on an

interesting metaphor (often in a way that reflected the instinctive, irrational patterns of the mind).

Foregrounding the use of colour in this way in general made for a more fluid, less obvious form, and it expanded

the use of harmony and chords beyond their usual functions to being a symbolic presence in their own right.

In a parallel development in Russia, Scriabin wanted listeners to hear ‘the unheard tones between the keys’,

emphasising the particular resonance of each chord. A particularly ‘colourful’ and very symbolic chord was his

so-called ‘Prometheus’ or ‘mystic’ chord, shown here in one of its iterations:

This prefigures a preoccupation with chordal resonance and spiritual symbolism by Messiaen years later.

Here is a version of Messiaen’s ‘chord of resonance’, a chord that he felt deeply connected him to the sense

of space in nature and its connection to the divine:

Inspired by the thinking of Debussy and Scriabin, Messiaen also allowed colour to be a dominating force in

his conceptualisation of music and how it connects to an extra-musical world. As with Debussy, the choice of

harmonic colours were often underpinned by a strict adherence to scales or tone sets and complex theories

for how these translate from horizontal to vertical alignments. The rigour of this thinking, though, was hidden

by the apparent spontaneity and freedom of the music.

More evident would be the general sound palette from which the individual colours would be drawn. In

Debussy’s case, that could be the gamelan or other oriental instruments. ‘Pagodes’ from his three Estampes

(1904) is an exercise in oriental timbre as much as it is an exploration of oriental scales.

This is relevant to AQA 3.1.8 Art music since 1910 – Messiaen

This is relevant to Edexcel 3.1 Fusions: Debussy Estampes

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Messiaen saw birdsong as the most naturally colourful music in the world. For him, birds were messengers

from the beyond, creating music that was freed from time and unfathomably rich in timbral possibilities. This,

combined with his synaesthesia, which enabled him to ‘see’ complex colours as a result of a single chord or

sequence of harmonies, resulted in a style that celebrated colour and birdsong in a completely innovative way.

This ‘style oiseau’ (‘bird style’), as he was to call it, started in earnest in the first movement of his Quatuor pour

la fin du temps, where birds (clarinet and violin) are seen as symbols of freedom, and their song given an

‘ecstatic’ colouring by the piano underneath. It was his view, when trying to transcribe the monody of birdsong,

that the best way to capture its distinctive timbre was to surround it with an ‘aureole’ of harmonies. Even a

parallel line to the birdsong set at a particular interval could suffice as an approximation of colour.

� A quick demonstration of this would be to take an atonal melody and underlay it with a line at different

intervals, discussing the tonal implications and how the same melody lands with the listener.

Another student-friendly example of Messiaen’s use of colour would be the sixth movement of his Turangalîla

Symphony, ‘Jardin du sommeil d’amour’ (‘Garden of the sleep of love’). The muted strings represent the lovers

Tristan and Isolde sleeping, with a single line on the piano giving out the song of a nightingale as they dream.

Combined with the soft colours of flute and early electronic instrument the ondes Martenot, this scene works

beautifully as a sumptuous depiction of dream and colour – to be listened to with eyes shut at the end of a

session, perhaps!

Expanding the discussion on colour

Having looked at the role of non-functional harmony and the inspiration of other sound palettes – be they from

the Far East or birdsong – the discussion could now flow into the Expressionists’ use of ‘tone-colour melodies’

(‘Klangfarbenmelodien’).

� Ask students to play a single note in turn, passing it seamlessly from one instrument to the next, and

listening with eyes closed for colour.

This simple colouration of a single note opens the ears for an appreciation of Schoenberg’s innovations in

his Five Pieces, Op. 16 (1909), in particular the central movement, ‘Farben’. It his here that his ‘tone-colour

melodies’ have their most obvious expression, with both chords and melody sustained as much by choice of

instrumental timbre as they are by pitch, creating a kaleidoscopic effect for a sensitive ear.

Schoenberg’s sensitivity to colour was no doubt enhanced by his interest in painting, and his understanding of

colour symbolism in the works of Kandinsky and others at the time. The composer’s own paintings, for example

his 1910 Blauer Blick, are striking mainly for their choice of colour.

‘PAGODES’ EXERCISE – VERTICALISING THE PENTATONIC SCALE

Students could be asked to find 10 different chords that derive from a pentatonic scale, then, using those chords as pillars, improvise their way between them.

Messiaen called birds ‘our little servants of immaterial joy’.

NON-FUNCTIONAL CHORDS AND THEIR COLOURS

Encourage students to pick a colour, and then produce a sequence of four chords that delve into that colour, considering voicing and register. The constraint of four chords is important, to improve focus. Is it possible to differentiate between a gold and a bronze chord?

Then add a description of texture (eg watery blue, hard-slate grey) to give the characterisation more depth.

With students who are more adept at improvisation, a paired exercise could involve one group setting up a colour scheme for another to create music to.

This can be inverted by having the improviser(s) play a sequence of colours that they have pre-ordained and having the others guess what that sequence was.

‘Tone-colour melodies! How acute the senses that would be able to perceive them! How high the development of spirit that could find pleasure in such subtle things!’ Arnold Schoenberg

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PERSPECTIVE AND COLOUR

Our perception of tone colour is also affected by an appreciation of distance to the source of the sound.

Webern, one of Schoenberg’s disciples, exemplifies this in the fourth of his Six Pieces for Large Orchestra

(1913). The opening roll on a bass drum and percussion effects seem from a different world, placed as they

are right at the edge of our hearing. Then come the other layers of solo and ensemble sounds, characterised

as much by their instrumental colour as they are by their depth of field in our aural landscape.

Charles Ives also experimented with this sense of relative distance to the sound by creating a collage of

different tonal planes. A famous example would be The Unanswered Question of 1908 (revised 1935), with

the strings appearing the most distant in the background, the solo trumpet in the mid-ground and the frenetic

woodwind in the foreground. The level of dissonance is dictated by this positioning, moving from the most

consonant in the background (the strings) through to the most strident in the foreground (woodwind). As the

sound comes closer, so it gets brighter and its tonal language becomes more aggressive.

Rhythm

Ask your students to consider how they would, as radical musical innovators, set about revolutionising the

world of rhythm. How would they manipulate rhythm to create something entirely new?

The discussion could then be framed around these early modernist responses to the same question:

� Go barless! Reject meter completely and go ‘hors tempo’.

� Examine syncopation and cross-rhythms, but sticking within a meter.

� Mix the meters and time signatures.

� Take a textural approach: layer individual rhythms in way that works together.

� Create a collage of mismatching tempos and hypermeters.

� Adopt and adapt folk rhythms.

� Be inspired by the rhythms of speech.

� Create additive, ametric patterns.

Before looking at the impact of these lines of enquiry in music, it is worth pointing out that rhythm was played

with in other art forms as well. Paul Klee’s painting Red, Green and Violet-Yellow Rhythms (1920) is motivated

by the pacing of shapes and colours and their perceived rhythm across the canvas, for example. Or the

innovative typography in e.e.cummings’ poem Buffalo Bill (c.1910) suggests a distinct rhythm and delivery to

the reader.

Rhythm in The Rite of Spring

Although it’s often described as such, there’s nothing ‘primitive’ about the complexity of the rhythmic thinking

found in Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1913). Additive patterns abound, derived in part from African drumming

and the exuberant syncopation of jazz rhythms.

The main trick in using additive rhythms is to get rid of an obvious hypermeter – for example, into four- or eight-

bar phrases. Instead, the consistent element becomes a much smaller unit, a quaver or semiquaver, which is

organised into sequences that wax and wane by a unit at a time, in a far more organic way. This, combined

with violent off-beat accents and brutally stamped repeated notes, is part of the thrill of listening to The Rite of

Spring. Even when you know it well, there is a sense you don’t quite know what’s round the corner.

You can imagine the utter confusion of the Russian ballet dancers as they first tried to find a regular beat or

count out their usual eight steps. This was unlike anything they had encountered before.

The introduction to The Rite of Spring gives us an example of Stravinsky innovating in six of the seven areas

bullet-pointed above.

The opening bassoon solo is marked ‘ad lib’, and the accompanying horn appears to oscillate freely between

two notes. We start in a place of (apparent) rhythmic freedom, without any sense of pulse or meter. There is

mixed meter and with subtle inflections of tempo (‘poco accelerando’, ‘a tempo’, ‘più mosso’, etc).

See Edexcel 3.1 New Directions – Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring

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In the ‘scratching, gnawing and wiggling of birds and beasts’ that follows, each instrument enters with a different

motivic rhythm. The oboe gives a single-note bird rhythm, the violins and violas a pizzicato ‘scratching’, and

the piccolo clarinet slithers around in triplets. A bass clarinet ‘ribbits’ like a large toad, low in its register. The

rhythms are layered against each other freely, again with no underlying sense of pulse as yet.

Slowly a pulse begins to emerge at figure 7, a regular triplet at last, but unsettled by the fact that it is shared

between alto flute and solo cello.

From figure 10 onwards, three temporal planes are brought together. The basses are essentially static, the

double bassoons and bassoons now call out the pulse (arranged cunningly as hemiolas, triplets phrased as

couplets), and over the top the woodwind layer their own apparently free animal motifs. Played separately,

each plane would give a very different sense of time passing.

This culminates in return of the solo bassoon’s opening cry at figure 12, with a last moment of freedom before

the tribal dance announces itself four bars later, in menacing semiquavers plucked in the violins. From that

point on, a sense of pulse will dominate the texture.

This introduction encapsulates Stravinsky’s rhythmic genius, giving us a microcosm of so many different

innovations. There are more spectacular displays of mixed meter later on, but this opening paragraph subtly

breaks with convention on so many levels.

The later dances build on the thrill of having an entire orchestra hammer out the same edge-of-seat rhythms

in a tightrope test of ensemble playing. This additive rhythm from the ‘Sacrificial Dance’, which provides the

climax to the work, is a case in point:

The importance of The Rite of Spring cannot be underestimated. It emancipated rhythm from conventional

constraints, embraced a new complexity and opened up a new pathway between Western art music and

folk music.

The second movement of Bartók’s String Quartet No. 2 (1917) picks up on these innovations, taking them a

step further by having a flexible pulse that gradually quickens or slows. Achieving good ensemble here is a

feat for any quartet, with all four players having to negotiate their sense of pulse relative with each other.

It was Bartók who, more than any other early modernist, took on the mantle of generating new musical idioms

out of folk rhythms and ideas. One of the most accessible – and most imitated - aspects of this approach was

his toccata style, with driving repeated-note ostinato rhythms offset by folk-inspired interjections above. His

Allegro barbaro (1911) is a good early example, best appreciated by following the score along to the recording

on this clip.

An interesting comparison piece is Prokofiev’s Toccata in D minor (1912), which again can be found with the

score alongside on this clip. This is the young Prokofiev creating a showpiece for himself and his percussive

technique. The Toccata belongs to his ‘Scythian’ style, deliberately primitive and calling to mind ancient

Russian tribes.

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SUMMARY AND SESSION PLAN

The aim of this resource has been to give a set of starting points for explaining key concepts behind

developments in 20th-century music and ways of activating and assimilating that knowledge. This can be

used mainly in the appreciation units, but also in the free composition briefs where an understanding of such

techniques can also be evidenced.

Early modernist works tend to be the ones that connect most easily with a teenage mindset, balancing an

emotional directness with aesthetic issues that can be helpfully illustrated through other art forms. In an ideal

world, an overview of this highly influential corner in music history would stretch over a term, but given the other

demands and focal areas of the syllabus, below is a suggested template for a three-hour session which could

at least launch some take-home tasks and other independent explorations.

Three-hour session plan for introducing early modernism.

Objectives:

� To set a cross-disciplinary context for appreciating music developments at the turn of the century and

beyond.

� To introduce useful terminology for use in appreciation units.

� To provide small-group improvisation and creative tasks that help embed key concepts.

� To provide starting points for potential free compositions.

Timing (mins)

Activity Technique

5 Assess prior knowledge on modernism: what it means for them, which composers and artists they can identify

Plenary discussion

30 Setting context: inherited conceptsListen to the end of Romanticism (Mahler 7, Sibelius 7, Schoenberg Verklärte Nacht) and deduce how musical aesthetic was already in flux.

LectureListening exercise with Q&A

10 The shifting gaze: show the three snowscapes, illustrated with Debussy’s Children’s Corner

Powerpoint presentation with audio examples.

20 Correspondence of the senses: creative writing exercise Individual work, peer feedback

ADDITIVE GAMES

� Ask a group of students to create a short sequence using twos and threes, eg 2+3+3+3+2.

� Get them to loop that pattern, tapping it out in quavers. Then set it to notes, creating a looping melody.

� Then introduce several rests so that the idea appears more complicated. The underlying additive structure remains the same.

� Ask another group to create a sequence that totals the same amount, just in a different order, eg 3+3+2+2+3.

� Once they have gone through the same process as above, layer it against the first rhythm.

� If they are feeling confident, they can then phase the entry of their rhythms so they start at different times.

� Another group could take the same sequence as one of the above and play it half-time as an augmented bass line.

13 Music Teacher July 2016

Timing (mins)

Activity Technique

15

30

10

COLOUR:Four-chord colour exercise

Demonstrate different approaches to thinking in colour by French (Debussy and Messiaen) and German composers (Schoenberg and Webern).

BREAK

Small groups with instruments

Seminar with audio demos.

10

10

25

RHYTHM:How would students innovate with rhythm?

Show how Stravinsky moves from freedom to rhythmic complexity in the introduction to The Rite of Spring.

Play additive rhythm games

Small group discussion

Lecture with score

Small groups with instruments

5 Listen, eyes closed, to an excerpt of Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphony, sixth movement. Discuss briefly.

Aural excerpt and discussion.

10 Ask them to recap main learning points and consider applications for their learning that term.

Student recap