Page 18 - summer 22

*As a joke, he attached a handful of explanatory mock-footnotes to The Wasteland.

Ezra Pound urged Modernists to “Make it new”. He might as well have said, “Make it
difficult!” When challenged about this, Eliot said his poetry had to be difficult
because the modern industrial urban civilisation in which he wrote was so
complicated. As we’ll see in a later session, this will become a big issue with the rise
th
of 20 century popular culture. Does culture have to be difficult to be the real thing?
Is true culture inevitably elitist?

4. Arnold Schoenberg
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Schoenberg’s 2 String Quartet, described by a critic as “breathtakingly
unconventional”, revolutionised music at a stroke. It was atonal: listeners had to
navigate with no key, no harmony, no tune, no consonance. In the final movement,
he adds a soprano voice which floats upward free of any tonal points of reference.
Schoenberg said he was “emancipating dissonance” which was not the enemy of

consonance but its extension. He said, “ I have broken through all the barriers of a
past aesthetic through an inner compulsion stronger than training. I strive for
complete liberation from all forms, from all symbols of cohesion and of logic.” It was
only 1908, and nothing could be more Modernist.

And yet … in 1921 he decided that he some form was necessary for musical

composition and invented one. His 12-note serial form was based on using all 12
notes in a fixed order throughout the piece, though this can be reversed or inverted;
the musical score resembles a geometrical construction. The details are less
important than the fact that Schoenberg felt the need for it, and also that he claimed
to having based it on his discovery by experimentation the true nature of sound-
relationships: a strange combination of science and avant-gardism, though it won a
lot of support from his admirers, notably serious music expert Theodore Adorno.
Mondrian had similarly quasi-scientific views about the proportions of his abstract
grids, alongside his spiritual ones. Modernism had no single philosophical, spiritual or

political system as its foundation. It broke rules rather than followed them. As
Schoenberg showed, it even broke its own rules; having deconstructed centuries of
musical form, he promptly invents a new one.

Less profound than Schoenberg but much noisier was the Russian avant-garde
composer Igor Stravinsky’s production, The Rites of Spring (1913). Modernist expert

Christopher Butler summarises it: “primitive savagery, then apparent cacophony,
unprecedented shifts in rhythm, and a final climactic stampede in the ‘Dance of the
Earth’, in which a sacrificial virgin dances herself to death.” Audience reaction verged