New music (German: Neue Musik; French: nouvelle musique) is the collective term for a wealth of different currents in composed Western art music from around 1910 to the present – the period known as contemporary classical music. It is characterised in particular by – sometimes radical – expansions of tonal, harmonic, melodic and rhythmic means and forms. It is also characterised by the search for new sounds, new forms or new combinations of old styles, which is partly a continuation of existing traditions, partly a deliberate break with tradition and appears either as progress or as renewal (neo- or post-styles).
Roughly speaking, Neue Musik can be divided into the period from around 1910 to the Second World War – often referred to as "modernism" – and the reorientation after the Second World War, which is perceived as "radical" – usually apostrophised as avant-garde – up to the present. The latter period is sometimes subdivided into the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, whereby the following decades have not yet been further differentiated (the summary term "postmodernism" has not become established).
In order to describe contemporary music in a narrower sense, the term Zeitgenössische Musik (English contemporary music, French musique contemporaine) is used without referring to a fixed periodisation. The term "Neue Musik" was coined by the music journalist Paul Bekker in 1919.
Representatives of Neue Musik are sometimes called Neutöner.Dorothea Kolland: Die Jugendmusikbewegung. "Gemeinschaftsmusik", Theorie und Praxis. Metzler, Stuttgart 1979, , Anmerkung 160: "Das Wort ‚Neutöner‘ ist möglicherweise übernommen von Möller van der Bruck (sic!, richtig: Moeller van den Bruck), der 1899 ein Buch mit dem Titel ‚Neutöner‘ veröffentlichte, er bezog diesen Titel jedoch auf Literaten. In der Nachkriegsliteratur charakterisiert er, aus konservativer Sicht abwertend, in Wolfgang Koeppens Roman Der Tod in Rom (1954) den Zwölfton-Komponisten Siegfried Pfaffrath“.
Compositional means and styles
The most important step in the reorientation of musical language was taken in the field of harmony, namely the gradual abandonment of tonality – towards free atonality and finally towards twelve-tone technique. Towards the end of the 19th century, the tendency to use increasingly complex chord formations led to harmonic areas that could no longer be clearly explained by the underlying major-minor tonality – a process that had already begun with Wagner and Liszt. From this, Arnold Schönberg and his students Alban Berg and Anton Webern drew the most systematic consequence, which culminated in the formulation (1924) of the method of "composition with twelve tones related only to one another" (dodecaphony). These atonal rules of composition provide composers with a toolkit that helps to avoid the principles of tonality. The designation as "Second Viennese School" in analogy to the "First Viennese School" (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven) already betrays the special position that this group of composers has as a mediating authority.
The principle of using all twelve tones of the tempered scale equally, without favouring individual tones, seems to have occupied various composers in the first two decades of the 20th century, who simultaneously, but independently of Schönberg, advanced to similarly bold results. Among these experimenters, in whose works twelve-tone and serial approaches can be discerned, is first of all Josef Matthias Hauer, who publicly argued with Schönberg about the "copyright" to twelve-tone music. Also to be mentioned is Alexander Scriabin, whose atonal sound-centre technique, based on quartal layering, subsequently paved the way for remarkable experiments by a whole generation of young Russian composers. The significance of this generation of composers for New Music, which emerged in the climate of the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, could only penetrate into consciousness in the second half of the century, as they were already systematically eliminated by the Stalinist dictatorship in the late 1920s. Here, Nikolai Roslavets, Arthur Lourié, Alexander Mossolov and Ivan Wyschnegradsky should be mentioned as representatives.
A major shortcoming of the abandonment of major-minor tonality, however, was the extensive loss of the form-forming forces of this harmonic system. Composers countered this deficiency in very different ways. In order to avoid the classical-romantic musical forms, they now chose for the new music partly free (rhapsody, fantasy), or neutral (concert, orchestral piece) designations, or self-chosen, sometimes extremely short, aphoristic forms (Webern, Schönberg). Others adhered to traditional forms, even though their works themselves took this concept ad absurdum, or filled the traditional ideas of form with new content (Scriabin's single-movement piano sonatas, Schoenberg's sonata forms with the abandonment of the tonality that founded them in the first place). Even the fundamental idea of a continuous, purposeful processing of musical thoughts within a work loses its primacy, parallel to the loss of the 19th century's belief in progress. New possibilities of shaping form, beyond parameters of music, which had previously been treated rather stepmotherly, such as timbre, rhythm, dynamics, systematic resp. Free montage techniques in Igor Stravinsky or Charles Ives, the rejection of the time directionality of music, as well as an increasing individualism claim their place.
A musical source whose potential was also used for experimentation is folklore. While previous generations of composers had repeatedly chosen exotic subjects in order to legitimise structures that deviated from the prevailing rules of composition, it was in the work of Claude Debussy that a stylistic and structural adaptation of Javanese gamelan music, which he had become acquainted with in 1889 at the Paris 1889 World's Fair, can be observed for the first time. In this context, the work of Béla Bartók, who had already explored most of the fundamental characteristics of his new style by means of a systematic study of Balkan folklore in 1908, is to be regarded as exemplary. In the course of this development, Bartók arrived at the treatment of the "piano as a percussion instrument" with his Allegro barbaro (1911), which subsequently had a decisive influence on composers' treatment of this instrument. The rhythmic complexities peculiar to Slavic folklore were also appropriated by Igor Stravinsky in his early ballet compositions written for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Significantly, Stravinsky uses a given "barbaric-pagan" stage plot for his most revolutionary experiment in this respect (The Rite of Spring 1913).
It was also Stravinsky who, in the further course of the 1910s, developed his compositional style in a direction that became exemplary for Neoclassicism. In France, various young composers appeared on the scene who devoted themselves to a similar emphatically anti-romantic aesthetic. The Groupe des Six was formed around Erik Satie, whose leading theoretician was Jean Cocteau. In Germany, Paul Hindemith was the most prominent representative of this movement. The proposal to use the canon of musical forms, such as the Baroque, to renew the musical language had already been put forward by Ferruccio Busoni in his Draft of a New Aesthetic of Musical Art. In the spring of 1920, Busoni formulated this idea again in an essay entitled Young Classicism.
Furthermore, the radical experiments devoted to the possibilities of microtonal music are exceptional. These include Alois Hába, who, encouraged by Busoni, found his preconditions in Bohemian-Moravian musicianship, and on the other hand Ivan Wyschnegradsky, whose microtonality is to be understood as a consistent further development of the sound-centre technique of Alexander Scriabin. In the wake of the Italian Futurism around Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Francesco Balilla Pratella, which was based in the visual arts, Luigi Russolo in his manifesto The Art of Noises (1913, 1916) designed a style called Bruitism, which made use of newly constructed sound generators, the so-called intonarumori.Luigi Russolo: Die Geräuschkunst (1916, 1999)
The spectrum of musical expression is extended by another interesting experiment that also enters the realm of the musical application of sounds, namely the tone cluster by Henry Cowell. Some of the early piano pieces by Leo Ornstein and George Antheil also tend towards quite comparable tone clusters. With Edgar Varèse and Charles Ives, two composers should be mentioned whose works, which are exceptional in every respect, cannot be attributed to any larger movement and whose significance was only fully recognised in the second half of the century.
The increasing industrialisation, which slowly began to take hold of all areas of life, is reflected in an enthusiasm for technology and (compositional) machine aesthetics, which was initially carried by the Futurist movement. Thus, the various technical innovations, such as the invention of the vacuum tube, the development of radio technology, the sound film and tape technology, moved into the musical field of vision. These innovations also favoured the development of new electric playing instruments, which is also significant with regard to the original compositions created for them. Lew Termen's Theremin, Friedrich Trautwein's trautonium and the Ondes Martenot of the Frenchman Maurice Martenot should be highlighted here. The partly enthusiastic hope for progress that was attached to the musically useful application of these early experiments was, however, only partially fulfilled. Nevertheless, the new instruments and technical developments possessed a musically inspiring potential that, in the case of some composers, was reflected in extraordinarily visionary conceptions that could only actually be technically realised decades later. The first compositional explorations of the musical possibilities of pianola also belong in this context. The medial dissemination of music by means of records and radio also made possible the enormously accelerated exchange or reception of musical developments that had been almost unknown until then, as can be seen from the rapid popularisation and reception of jazz. In general, it can be said that the period from around 1920 onwards was one of general "departure for new shores" – with many very different approaches. Essentially, this pluralism of styles has been preserved until today or, after a short period of mutual polemics between Serialism and adherents of traditional compositional styles (from about the mid-1950s onwards), has ceased again. Historical preconditions
In the 20th century, a line of development of musical progress continued; every composer still known today has contributed something to it. This old longing for progress and modernity – through conscious separation from tradition and convention – can, however, take on a fetish-like character in Western society, which is shaped by science and technology. The appearance of the "new" is always accompanied by a feeling of uncertainty and scepticism. At the beginning of the 20th century, the use of music and the discussion of its meaning and purpose was still reserved for an infinitesimally small, but all the more knowledgeable part of society. This relationship – the small elite group of privileged people here and the large uninvolved masses there – has only changed outwardly through the increasing dissemination of music through the media. Today, music is accessible to everyone, but as far as understanding "Neue Musik" is concerned, there is a lack of education in many cases, including that of the ear. The changed relationship between man and music has made aesthetic questions about the nature and purpose of music a public debate.