On 16 October 1955, in the final concert in that year's Donaueschinger Musiktage (the sixth festival since it had been relaunched by the head of music at the radio station Südwestfunk (SWF), Heinrich Strobel), the SWF orchestra, conducted by Hans Rosbaud, gave the world première of Iannis Xenakis's Metastaseis (1953–4).Footnote ¹ The work embodied a revolutionary approach to composition, arguably anticipated in some of the music of Edgard Varèse, but never taken so far by him. It eschewed any type of motivic or thematic working (or serial composition, about which Xenakis published a critique that year),Footnote ² and any obvious use of functional harmony, in favour of morphing, statistically derived masses of sound with copious use of string glissandos. The concert also featured works by Giselher Klebe and Luigi Dallapiccola which extended interwar dodecaphonic idioms, as well as Paul Hindemith's Konzertmusik for string orchestra and brass, op. 50 (1930).Footnote ³

Four years later, on 25 November 1959, the Utrechts Stedelijk Orkest, conducted by Paul Huppers, gave the world première of Matthijs Vermeulen's esoteric yet tonal Sixth Symphony (1956–8), Les minutes heureuses, which is dominated by continual motivic ‘developing variation’.Footnote ⁴ This was also performed, together with works by Karl Amadeus Hartmann and B. A. Zimmermann, and the première of György Ligeti's Apparitions (1958–9), by the Norddeutscher Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester at the ISCM World Music Days in Cologne on 19 June 1960.Footnote ⁵ This festival featured premières or performances of what are now considered landmark modernist works, such as the first version of Pierre Boulez's Pli selon pli (1957–60), Mauricio Kagel's Anagrama (1957–8), Luigi Nono's Cori di Didone (1958) and Karlheinz Stockhausen's Kontakte (1958–60), set alongside Milhaud's Symphony no. 8 (1957) and works by Arthur Berger, Boris Blacher, Wolfgang Fortner, Klebe, Roger Sessions and others.Footnote ⁶ Not all radical composers were enamoured of the ISCM's selections, and a group of composers and artists around Mary Bauermeister organized a special Contre-fest in her studio on 15–19 June (the ISCM took place on 10–19 June), in which iconoclastic works, actions and happenings of George Brecht, Sylvano Bussotti, John Cage, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Nam June Paik, Christian Wolff and La Monte Young were presented, and Heinz-Klaus Metzger read out his Kölner Manifest, entailing a Marxist and post-Adornian reading of Cage in opposition to most existing musical culture.Footnote ⁷ Similar motivations underlay the creation in the same year of the series Neue Musik München by Josef Anton Riedl.Footnote ⁸

Other works composed during the period 1955–60 include Dieter Schnebel's für stimmen (… missa est); dt 31,6 for 12 vocal ensembles (1956–8), using serial procedures applied to obscured vocal fragments using a text from the Book of Deuteronomy,Footnote ⁹ Tadeusz Baird's mixture of dodecaphony and free atonality entitled Four Essays (1958),Footnote ¹⁰ Bruno Maderna's tape work Continuo (1958)Footnote ¹¹ and Roman Haubenstock-Ramati's indeterminate graphic score Mobile für Shakespeare (1958), as well as Shostakovich's Symphony no. 11, The Year 1905 (1957) (performed in the Warsaw Autumn Festival in 1958, as was the Baird),Footnote ¹² Francis Poulenc's Gloria (1959) and Benjamin Britten's opera A Midsummer Night's Dream (1959–60).

I would consider all of these compositions to be ‘modernist’, though some employ modernist idioms developed earlier in the century. As a cross-section of art music created during this often mischaracterized period, the works represent a more pluralist picture than is often assumed. Programming dominated by serial music and a few works in other idioms characterized Boulez's Domaine Musical series from its foundation in 1956.Footnote ¹³ However, the programmes of the Darmstädter Ferienkurse from this period show a more varied repertory than is often imagined; if in 1956 and 1957 dodecaphonic or serial music accounted for around half the works performed (unlike in previous years), the visit of Cage and David Tudor the following year changed the balance and aesthetic direction significantly.Footnote ¹⁴ A similar pattern can be found in the programmes of the Musik der Zeit series in Cologne (where various electronic works, Stockhausen's Gruppen (1955–7) and Nono's Il canto sospeso (1955–6) were premièred),Footnote ¹⁵ while at the Festival Internazionale di Musica Contemporanea della Biennale di Venezia, the programming was far more slanted towards music from interwar traditions.Footnote ¹⁶

This picture contrasts with the prevailing accounts of modernism within anglophone musicology published during the 1980s and 1990s. After Joseph Kerman, writing in 1985, portrayed a somewhat homogeneous world of serial and electronic music in ‘young Europe’ in the period 1945–60, dominated by the thinking in the journal Die Reihe,Footnote ¹⁷ a whole range of increasingly monolithic and largely negative views followed, from scholars self-identifying with postmodernism and/or the ‘new musicology’, of whom Susan McClary, Rose Rosengard Subotnick, Lawrence Kramer, Georgina Born and in some ways Richard Taruskin are just a few.Footnote ¹⁸ McClary and Subotnick portrayed a world in which taste and prestige were determined by elite traditions of specialists (drawing upon a long tradition of populist anglophone attacks on ‘experts’, which at the time of writing have a new immediacy),Footnote ¹⁹ leading to the alleged marginalization (in terms of academic curricula rather than concert programming) of more ‘mainstream’ composers and especially popular music – which flourishes in the ‘American marketplace’ rather than the ‘European elitist tradition’, according to Subotnick. Kramer portrayed modernist music as self-referential and relatively oblivious to ‘extramusical’ considerations.Footnote ²⁰ (Where this would leave Messiaen's Vingt regards (1944) or Stockhausen's Hymnen (1966–7) is anyone's guess.) Born's polemic on IRCAM continues to be evoked by some as an exemplary model, but has been severely criticized for some of the simplistic dualisms upon which it is founded, as well as its reliance upon secondary literature and the institution's own self-aggrandizing rhetoric rather than engagement with the music produced there.Footnote ²¹ In his Oxford History of Western Music, Taruskin presented at least certain types of ‘high’ modernism as essentially historical aberrations and cited the growing body of scholarly opinion which argues that the alleged success of much post-1945 modernist repertory was a direct result of covert actions and funding as part of the cold war.Footnote ²² Several scholars including myself have addressed these and related claims elsewhere (in particular the false and unevidenced allegation that the CIA funded the Darmstädter Ferienkurse),Footnote ²³ and I will not repeat the arguments here, other than to note that recently in this very journal one writer cited a scholarly source as saying the very opposite of what it actually does, in order to bolster Taruskin's point.Footnote ²⁴

A comprehensive history of anti-modernist tendencies in critical discourse about music has yet to be written; such a history would, I believe, reveal plenty of common ideologies, tropes and conspiratorial thinking. The tradition would include Hans Pfitzner's frenzied attacks on Ferruccio Busoni and Paul Bekker in the 1910s and 1920s and associations of new music with ‘Russian Jewish criminals' who, Pfitzner claimed, had sold out Germany at the end of the First World War;Footnote ²⁵ the stoking of the concept of Musik-Bolschewismus in the 1920s;Footnote ²⁶ Richard Eichenauer's 1932 text Musik und Rasse, which associated atonality, microtones and other tendencies with Jewish musicians following a ‘law of their race’ to destroy ‘harmonious polyphony’;Footnote ²⁷ and the attacks by the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians and their fellow-travellers on a new musical ‘left wing’ (viewed in Leninist terms as an ‘infantile disorder’).Footnote ²⁸ It would also engage with the hardening of official Soviet attitudes against many varieties of modern music as epitomizing bourgeois and Western tendencies;Footnote ²⁹ the various censures of ‘formalism’ in the 1930s and 1940s, culminating in the 1948 Zhdanov decree;Footnote ³⁰ the conservative 1955 creed The Agony of Modern Music by Henry Pleasants (himself a CIA agent), bemoaning the chasm between lay audiences and contemporary composers, and evoking Gershwin and jazz instead as the only real heirs to the classical tradition;Footnote ³¹ and later critiques from Samuel Lipman and Roger Scruton,Footnote ³² as well as those from postmodernists and new musicologists. While it would be simplistic to elide the distinctions between these traditions of writing (especially with respect to anti-Semitism), there are common ideological tropes, including anti-intellectualism, a preference for music rooted in the singing or dancing body as against the overly ‘cerebral’ modernism, in some cases disdain for ‘unnatural’ approaches to composition, and populist appeals to large ‘masses' of listeners who supposedly reject such work, combined with attacks on the elites who supposedly impose it upon them.

In response, it is not surprising that many of those sympathetic to and knowledgeable about such music would want to respond with a more nuanced and pluralistic view. Scholars including Joseph Straus, Björn Heile and Martin Iddon have addressed directly issues and misrepresentations in various research since Kerman,Footnote ³³ but perhaps the most encouraging result has been the growth of a new and variegated body of scholarship on modernist music. A concomitant decline in writing on postmodernismFootnote ³⁴ is a key observation in Heile and Charles Wilson's penetrating introduction to their new edited collection The Routledge Research Companion to Modernism in Music (pp. 1–30).

The book is a major addition to this new body of work on musical modernism, developed in parallel with the area known as New Modernist Studies in literary and cultural scholarship, which emerged around 1999 with the establishment of the Modernist Studies Association, a range of major forums and many related publications.Footnote ³⁵ Writers in both fields emphasize conceptual expansion of the field, to encompass work not previously categorized as modernist and to incorporate modernist artists from a wider range of demographics, as well as often challenging an earlier orthodoxy which had maintained that modernism was a historical movement whose time had passed.Footnote ³⁶

Two of the most oft-cited earlier anglophone studies of modernism – the collection edited by Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, and Peter Nicholls's monograph – were overwhelmingly dominated by literature and drama.Footnote ³⁷ In 1994, however, Christopher Butler did much to marry the study of European literature, music and painting from 1900 to 1916, by tracing the manifestation of various themes (dissatisfaction with ideas of a common culture, the development of new languages, new conceptions of the self, and so on), then considering the embodiment of such themes in various artworks.Footnote ³⁸ Another important new development was Arnold Whittall's theorization, primarily from the late 1990s, of the idea of a ‘moderate mainstream’ or ‘modernist mainstream’ of composers (including Britten, Copland, Hindemith, Poulenc, Prokofiev, Shostakovich and others) who wished to avail themselves of many of the surface features of the avant-garde but without jettisoning a sense of line or other forms of more traditional coherence and continuity.Footnote ³⁹

But the book which, more than any other, injected new life into the study of musical modernism was another cross-disciplinary work, Daniel Albright's Untwisting the Serpent, published in 2000.Footnote ⁴⁰ With highly detailed individual engagement with specific works in different media, Albright also took a fresh thematic approach, via a range of highly original and distinctive artistic categories, organized into two large groups labelled Marsyas (for expressionism, hyperreality and neo-barbarism) and Apollo (for new objectivity, abstractionism and neoclassicism), in the process communicating simultaneously both a sense of art's operating according to some principles relatively autonomous of external determinants and at the same time the intertextuality of multiple artworks. Arguing that the modernist age began around 1907–9 and could be defined as ‘the testing of the limits of aesthetic construction’,Footnote ⁴¹ Albright could write originally on distinctive choices of music examples such as Stravinsky's Renard (1915–16), Weill's Der Jasager (1930), Ezra Pound's opera Le testament (1923, rev. 1926, 1933) and Kurt Schwitters's Ursonate (1922–32), though there is a heavy bias towards texted or programmatic works.

Albright followed this with an invaluable collection of primary sources on music and modernism,Footnote ⁴² and soon afterwards a steady stream of new book-length publications on modernism began to appear. In 2005 Walter Frisch published an important new study on German modernism from the death of Wagner until the end of the First World War in the context especially of philosophy and the visual arts,Footnote ⁴³ after which a range of authors and editors of collected essays concentrated on modernism in specific regions of Europe, including Matthew Riley and later Philip Rupprecht on Britain, Barbara Kelly on France, Ben Earle on Italy and Stephen Downes on central and eastern Europe.Footnote ⁴⁴ A 2008 collection edited by Dejan Despić and Melita Milin featured articles on lesser-known varieties of modernism from eastern Europe, especially Serbia (the site of the conference leading to the volume), as well as various considerations of the meaning of the term modernism, centres and peripheries, and other conceptions of ‘moderate’ or ‘moderated’ modernism which appear to have developed independently of Whittall.Footnote ⁴⁵

A 2009 volume edited by Heile included a series of essays examining aspects of post-1945 music and aesthetics from positions broadly sympathetic to modernism,Footnote ⁴⁶ while a monograph by David Metzer argued for a continued presence of modernist concepts – purity, silence, fragmentation, lamentation, sonic flux – in music from around the turn of the twenty-first century, focusing on works of Jonathan Harvey, György Kurtág, Helmut Lachenmann, Kaija Saariaho and Salvatore Sciarrino, as well as looking back to older works of Stockhausen and Nono.Footnote ⁴⁷ Two further edited collections, Musik in der Moderne/Music and Modernism and Transformations of Musical Modernism, featured varying degrees of direct engagement with modernism as an aesthetic concept and its history.Footnote ⁴⁸ A more iconoclastic perspective was provided by J. P. E. Harper-Scott, whose ferociously argued and intellectually uncompromising The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism made the case for musical modernism's centrality, vital importance and potential to point beyond the experienced present, via scathing critiques of what he described as ‘crypto-capitalist work’ in the form of ethnomusicology, empirical musicology, popular music studies and the work of Taruskin.Footnote ⁴⁹ Harper-Scott extended the concept of modernism to include the totality of twentieth-century music (as no music can be untouched by modernity),Footnote ⁵⁰ and proposed that the study of ‘faithful’ and ‘reactive’ modernisms (see below) be extended right back to the French Revolution. No less ambitious, and somewhat related, was Tobias Janz's large-scale study Zur Genealogie der musikalischen Moderne. This also took a very broad view of ‘die Moderne’ drawing at length upon the thought of Hegel, Niklas Luhmann and Max Weber to derive a concept founded upon rationalization, subjectivity in the context of bourgeois society and autonomy as a communicative principle, worked through examples of self-reflection and metatextuality in Beethoven, Chopin and Hugo Wolf, while testing the limits of the concept through examples from Wagner, multiple settings of Kipling's The Jungle Books and Sonic Youth's renditions of Cage.Footnote ⁵¹

The Routledge Research Companion to Modernism in Music belongs in this recent tradition and is in many ways an impressive achievement. There is a high level of intellectual rigour from the majority of the contributors, almost all of whom are professional musicologists (although every one of these is currently working in an anglophone institution). It constitutes a series of critical perspectives upon aspects of musical modernism, rather than an overview of the subject divided by region, aesthetic tendency, compositional technique, period and so on, and as such would not really be an ideal book for readers relatively new to these areas of music (although it is difficult to think of a volume which does provide such a role).Footnote ⁵²

In their remarkable Introduction, Heile and Wilson explore the question of what ‘modernism’ means, though without settling on any single answer which might inform the volume as a whole. Beyond the more familiar conceptualizations of the term, they also allude to a tradition of thought which has claimed the likes of Bridge, Britten, Elgar, Nielsen and Sibelius for modernism.Footnote ⁵³ Harper-Scott's all-inclusive view is a ‘strong’ application of this tradition bolstered by Whittall's concept of the modernist mainstream. But when does modernism start, and how much continuity or discontinuity is there between it and the body of work commonly categorized as ‘Romanticism’?

Whittall cites late Beethoven as the beginning of ‘an emergent musical modernism’,Footnote ⁵⁴ Harper-Scott proposes the French Revolution, and Julian Johnson proposes a single modernist period from the mid-eighteenth until the late twentieth century.Footnote ⁵⁵ Leonard B. Meyer argued in 1989 for a continuity between Romanticism and modernism (until around 1930, the ‘end of historic optimism’),Footnote ⁵⁶ and this idea was taken up in part by Taruskin, who theorizes a period of ‘maximalism’, an intensification and expansion in resources of Romanticism, in the period 1890–1914 (in the work of Mahler, Schoenberg and Strauss, and to varying degrees in Bartók, Debussy, Ives, Janáček, Skryabin, early Ravel and Stravinsky, and others (later extended in the work of Messiaen)), with ‘the “real” twentieth-century’ beginning only in the 1920s with Stravinsky's Octet (1923).Footnote ⁵⁷

Other models for periodization exist in wider artistic fields, the most fruitful of which I believe to be the quadripartite formulation of Art Berman for art and literature: (1) Early Modernism up to 1905, characterized by transcendentalism, spiritualism, artistic autonomy, aestheticism; (2) Midmodernism, c.1905–1920, with a weakening of transcendentalism and a greater concentration on the everyday; (3) High Modernism, from the 1920s, including Dada, surrealism and other forms of eclecticism, away from any vestiges of German idealism after Germany has lost the war, but instead incorporating a new focus on abstract form and formalist criticism; (4) Late Modernism, after 1945,Footnote ⁵⁸ in which there is an institutionalization of experimentation and iconoclasm, including in universities.Footnote ⁵⁹ Modernism would then come to an end with the advent of postmodernism from the mid-1970s. For music, I would add further modernist subcategories after this time, and include an earlier transitional period from the late 1840s until around 1890, focused upon Zukunftsmusik. Furthermore, a concept such as ‘interwar modernism’ (to do with style rather than literal period), so potentially spanning periods 3 and 4, is also useful as a way of distinguishing composers whose music after 1945 continued in these traditions without radical changes from the avant-garde (for example Britten, Copland, Dallapiccola, Ernesto Halffter, Hartmann, Shostakovich), without simply labelling them as traditionalists or conservatives.

The most common historical view of the provenance of the term ‘modernism’ locates its origins in Charles Baudelaire's Les fleurs du mal (1857) and the use of the term modernité in his Le peintre de la vie moderne (1863) (which receives its most obvious successor in Joris-Karl Huysmans's L'art moderne (1883)). Jonathan Swift had written back in 1737 of the ‘quaint modernisms' of various writers,Footnote ⁶⁰ while Jean-Jacques Rousseau had used the term moderniste in 1769, in a manner which has been claimed as the first indication of a response to modernity,Footnote ⁶¹ but the concept did not become more common until the mid-nineteenth century in both English and French.Footnote ⁶² It then took on a new meaning with the publication of Charles Périn's Le modernisme dans l’église (1881),Footnote ⁶³ after which it was used in the French and Spanish press to signify urbanity, sophistication, cosmopolitanism and the adoption of technological and industrial life,Footnote ⁶⁴ also fuelling a long theological debate leading to a denunciation by Pope Pius X in 1907.Footnote ⁶⁵ As a literary term in English, ‘modernism’ emerged in the early twentieth century,Footnote ⁶⁶ but was only rarely applied to music before the end of the 1970sFootnote ⁶⁷ (although the term ‘ultramodern’ had some currency in Britain, France and the USA in the interwar period),Footnote ⁶⁸ while modernisme is even rarer in French, especially in writing on music.Footnote ⁶⁹ The German concept of die Moderne has its roots in the writings of Hermann Bahr from 1890 onwards, where it denoted a mixture of aestheticism and cosmopolitanism, as distinct from naturalism, and was applied to music from around 1900 by Arthur Seidl, Paul Moos and Leopold Schmidt,Footnote ⁷⁰ although some of these incorporated Wagner, Zukunftsmusik and the Neudeutsche Schule, something that continues to divide opinion.Footnote ⁷¹ Moderne was practically superseded by Neue Musik after Paul Bekker's 1919 essay (favouring developments such as microtones, the splintering of tonality, non-Western allusions and especially a preference for line and counterpoint over vertically orientated composition),Footnote ⁷² generating a major debate in the first half of the 1920s before splitting into wider factions, including the Neue Sachlichkeit and the Stravinsky–Schoenberg partisans.Footnote ⁷³ The Cuban writer Ramón Perés published a polemic calling for ‘un arte esencialmente modernista’ in a Barcelona journal in 1884,Footnote ⁷⁴ then the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Dario initiated the term modernismo in 1888, to refer to a type of Hispanic art informed more strongly by French influences (Parnassianism, aestheticism, symbolism, decadence) than those from the former colonial power of Spain.Footnote ⁷⁵ Barcelona critics linked the concept with the music of Wagner, Franck and the Catalan composer Enric Morera in the 1890s, and later that of Strauss, Debussy, Falla and Stravinsky.Footnote ⁷⁶ If these manifestations differ, all can, I believe, be viewed as outgrowths of the early nineteenth-century concept of l'art pour l'art,Footnote ⁷⁷ asserting art's autonomy from morality, utility, simple representation and so on (via the huge influence of the leading protagonist Théophile Gautier upon Baudelaire and then Walter Pater, who in turn inspired a group of Austrian writers including Bahr and Hugo von Hofmannsthal).Footnote ⁷⁸ Wagner, on the grounds of his resistance to l'art pour l'art,Footnote ⁷⁹ is best considered a transitional figure in this context, though it is possible to conceive Liszt as an early or proto-modernist.Footnote ⁸⁰

But the different manifestations of the concept from around the turn of the twentieth century (compare early Satie with Strauss, Mahler or Skyrabin, let alone with mid-twentieth-century developments) and the general lack of coherent and meaningful definitions available frustrate attempts to make sweeping judgments on modernism in music. In The Routledge Research Companion to Modernism in Music, Harper-Scott (‘Reactive Modernism’, pp. 155–74) and Whittall (‘Foundations and Fixations’, pp. 353–78) have their own solutions to this, but few of the others really engage with the issues (with the major exception of Sarah Collins, to whom I will return below), and so their modernisms and modernities really require more qualifying terms relating to time and/or place. Edward Campbell's otherwise very interesting chapter on aesthetics (‘Musical Modernity, the Beautiful and the Sublime’, pp. 133–52) gives no rationale for the choice of composers (Debussy, Schoenberg, Stockhausen, B. A. Zimmermann, Lachenmann, Wolfgang Rihm, Morton Feldman, Sofia Gubaidulina, Georg Friedrich Haas, Raphaël Cendo). His conclusions might have been very different if an alternative pantheon had been used (say Satie, Stravinsky, Varèse, Poulenc, Shostakovich, Harry Partch, Tippett, Christian Wolff, Steve Reich, Chaya Czernowin).

I will deal here relatively briefly with a range of chapters before focusing on larger issues raised by others (space does not permit consideration of the important contributions of, for example, Eva Moreda Rodríguez, Amy Bauer and Mark Berry). Whittall, building upon earlier articles, considers recent British modernism, focusing on the music of James Clarke and, to a lesser degree, Morgan Hayes. Recalling how it became clear to him by the 1960s that atonality was not going to displace other varieties of tonal music, he frames this work in terms of an overview of his own attempts to theorize the intersections between more radical and conservative developments, concentrating upon the subjection of elements of the common-practice past to new compositional techniques, a model somewhat akin to that of Joseph Straus.

Harper-Scott's chapter employs a distilled version of some of the arguments and paradigms in his Quilting Points volume applied to different repertory, in particular the conception that various elements which can be categorized as tonal or non-tonal must be understood in light of the new reality engendered by modernism. A key example of such ‘reactive modernism’ (as opposed to ‘faithful modernism’, more thoroughly permeated by radical elements) is the allusion to ‘O du lieber Augustin’ in Schoenberg's Second String Quartet (1907–8). Harper-Scott uses this as a lens to view deliberate pitch distortions and consequent harmonization in Alfred Schnittke's Stille Nacht (1978), and a moment of apparent bitonality in the first of Poulenc's Trois mouvements perpétuels (1918, rev. 1939, 1962).

Liam Cagney (‘Vers une écriture liminale’, pp. 400–26) writes in considerable detail on transitional works of Gérard Grisey, all contextualized in terms of international musical influences (including those of Stockhausen and La Monte Young) and aspects of the technological and musico-ideological background with which Grisey interacted, in the process problematizing a common dichotomy between serialism and spectralism, further substantiated through examination of sketch materials.Footnote ⁸¹ This contrasts with a rather more basic treatment of Grisey in a disappointing chapter by Alistair Williams (‘Between Modernism and Postmodernism’, pp. 327–52), placing the composer alongside John Adams, Saariaho and Thomas Adès, in the context of rather hackneyed dualisms which were regularly posited 20 years ago, with claims that postmodernism ‘has equipped modernism to communicate more widely’ (p. 328), resembling arguments in a recent essay by McClary.Footnote ⁸² Speaking personally, I experienced a huge communicative dimension upon first hearing many major works of Boulez, Stockhausen, Henri Pousseur, Jean Barraqué, Franco Evangelisti, Maderna and others associated with ‘high’ post-1945 modernism, long before knowing anything about their technical workings. I also know of very many others with similar experiences, and continue to be drawn to such a body of work. When a June 2018 performance of Stockhausen's Gruppen at Tate Modern, London, was announced in February of that year, tickets sold out within days. It would be miserly to suggest that such a palpable group of listeners did not find the music communicative, and were interested only in the institutional prestige of the late composer.

M. J. Grant (‘The Composer as Communication Theorist’, pp. 287–306) comes from a position more sympathetic to the avant-garde, but it is hard to imagine her chapter convincing anyone who does not already believe in the communicative dimension of this work. She presents an outline of various avant-garde compositional developments, rather than a sustained focus on the possibilities of communication (notwithstanding relatively brief mentions of ideas from information theory taken up by Werner Meyer-Eppler and Abraham Moles). Especially problematic is Grant's assumption of a narrow positivistic role for a musical score, with performers simply as ‘executants’Footnote ⁸³ (except in the case of indeterminate scores), an approach which has had only limited application to the performance of Western art music at least since the late eighteenth century.

Stefan Knapik's final chapter in the volume (‘The Modernism of the Mainstream’, pp. 475–96) is a superb and long-overdue revisionist reappraisal of the ‘modernist/vitalist’ dichotomy of performance earlier presented by Taruskin,Footnote ⁸⁴ through examination of the thought and practice of a range of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century violin teachers and pedagogues in relation to wider musical and philosophical thought of the time. Knapik problematizes many common assumptions about nineteenth-century pedagogy, the relationship between ‘historicist’ and ‘modernist’ approaches to performance, and much else. However, this chapter does draw attention to the relatively paltry role that performance plays in the volume.Footnote ⁸⁵ There is still much research to be undertaken concerning all types of twentieth-century performers, whether playing contemporary or historical art music (not to mention those in other musical traditions), and about the conception of a ‘modernist’ style of performance from around the 1930s onwards, which has been presented pejoratively and as a homogeneous phenomenon by Bruce Haynes, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and Nicholas Cook.Footnote ⁸⁶ Important counter-evidence exists in some areas from Dorottya Fabian,Footnote ⁸⁷ but there is much more left to do for a period with such a huge range of recorded evidence available.

It should be uncontroversial now to argue that the production, dissemination and reception of modernist music depend upon the functioning of a range of institutions: new music festivals and concert series, radio stations, companies producing recordings to be bought and sold, institutions for teaching composition and performance, studios for the use of specialized equipment, publishers of new music, publicity outfits and so on, all of which may serve as agents of influence as significant as the musicians. Proper scholarly studies of institutions and their role in the wider picture are still relatively exceptional or overly agenda-driven (whether those produced by the institutions themselves, which can resemble promotional literature, or those like Born's), though there have been notable studies of the Darmstädter Ferienkurse, the Munich Musica Viva series and the Warsaw Autumn in particular.Footnote ⁸⁸

The primary chapter in the volume on this subject, by Martin Iddon (‘Institutions, Artworlds, New Music’, pp. 86–107), is quite problematic. Rather than comparatively evaluating a range of institutions and their effect upon music-making, Iddon spends the majority of the chapter on an attempt to create a theoretical framework about musical institutions in general, using theories from Arthur Danto, George Dickie and Howard Becker, interspersed with passages about actual post-1945 institutions (just a few, of a particular type: Darmstadt, IRCAM and the Warsaw Autumn), supposedly to exemplify the theoretical points being made. But these special passages are unremarkable and do not really demonstrate how Iddon's theoretical framework offers particular illumination. For example, he notes how the locations employed at Darmstadt have changed at various times, that few go to the main administrative headquarters and that some tutors remain teaching over a number of successive courses, while others either choose not to continue or are replaced, all at the end of two pages of musing on the precise meaning of ‘institutions' such as the Church of England or the British Constitution. And is it really necessary to spend much time laying out 1990s theories of different types of ‘institutionalism’ to explain that one software developer at IRCAM had their own wishes, but that the director, Boulez, had somewhat different priorities, with an emphasis on what had a tangible musical result? More significantly, Iddon almost wholly neglects the financial dimension of institutions, save for a tangential mention of an issue in the city budget at Darmstadt in the early 1970s.Footnote ⁸⁹ There is no mention of the extent to which such institutions are or were funded privately or publicly (which was very different in western or eastern Europe during the cold war, and took on a particular complexion through the ‘semi-state’ funding of many German new music festivals provided by the sponsorship of the radio stations, through their licence fees), which demands those who fund them might place upon decision-making, who would benefit from profits, and so on. This model thus presents culture and cultural institutions as if they were independent of state or private capital; as such, like that of its precursors, the theoretical language could be said to entail a neo-liberal mystification of such a crucial dimension. Considerations of differing possibilities of funding provided through government or broadcasting would be one way to investigate why, for example, there have been relatively few significant and durable international new music festivals in the United States.

After what I consider the Ur-new-music festival, the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein (ADMV, founded in 1861 by Liszt and Franz Brendel),Footnote ⁹⁰ and then the range of new institutions founded in Germany in the aftermath of the First World War (in particular the Donaueschinger Musiktage),Footnote ⁹¹ one of the most important and influential of all new music organizations was the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM; entitled the Internationale Gesellschaft für Neue Musik in German), founded in 1922 in Salzburg. In a fascinating chapter (‘What Was Contemporary Music?’, pp. 56–85), Sarah Collins focuses upon the concept of the ‘contemporary’ as it informed debates around the founding of this institution in particular and later ones. From the outset, aspirations to reflect ideas of modernist progress (which were already there at the foundation of the ADMV) were set against alternative desires simply to represent what was ‘contemporary’ in many places. For some, the term ‘contemporary’ is more neutral and purely chronological than modernism, Neue Musik and so on, but Collins, drawing upon the work of Born on IRCAM and Anne Shreffler on Stravinsky's Threni and the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF),Footnote ⁹² maintains that ‘“contemporary” has a pretence of neutrality while in fact being intensely ideological ’ (Collins's italics). As mentioned earlier, I cannot view Born's book as a reliable source, while Shreffler follows others in overestimating the impact of the CCF, primarily on the basis of conjecture. Collins's formulation is certainly valid in particular circumstances, but not necessarily as a general principle.

She argues that the concept of the ‘contemporary’ has three characteristics: (1) a quality of lateness, or ‘coming after’; (2) value pluralism; (3) association with internationalism and forging transnational alliances. In many cases, some or all of these characteristics undoubtedly hold, although I am unsure in the case of the Ensemble Intercontemporain (although their title might be considered a modification of the concept). Peter Osborne's argument, cited by Collins (p. 60), that the contemporary is both a historical and a geopolitical fiction, because of the non-existence of a shared subject position from which to survey it in its totality,Footnote ⁹³ already assumes a more specific and subjective definition than the purely chronological. Others, including David Clarke comparing ‘Elvis' with ‘Darmstadt’,Footnote ⁹⁴ critique the implied pluralism of the concept of the ‘contemporary’ because of its inability to capture major aesthetic incongruities which are chronologically similar. But I would identify Clarke's as another ‘crypto-capitalist’ argument, as presented by Harper-Scott, through its privileging of chronology and aesthetics, but not economics, thus making the role of capital invisible: any comparison of Elvis or other popular artists with subsidized contemporary work which disregards their different relationship to capital has limited value. Nonetheless, Collins's foregrounding and interrogation of this term is extremely valuable.

Is modernism fundamentally a European/North American phenomenon, or something wider? In Heile's own chapter (‘Musical Modernism, Global’, pp. 175–98), he proclaims at the outset his aim ‘to imagine musical modernism as a global phenomenon’. The first section is a rather severe set of denunciations and broad statements, with exaggerated claims for the global reach and domination of modernist Western art music, trivial in comparison with the neo-imperial hegemony of Anglo-American popular music. Heile then gives overviews of the new music cultures in four countries: Argentina (focusing on the opposing factions represented by Juan Carlos Paz and Alberto Ginastera), Mexico (above all through Carlos Chávez), Finland (described as ‘a musical backwater until at least the 1960s’, but with a focus here on the work of Erik Bergman) and Japan (from the earliest influence of European models, through to the work of Tōru Takemitsu, Toshi Ichiyanagi and Toshio Hosokawa). In each case there were composers engaging with advanced European or North American developments, some of them, such as Chávez, also drawing upon ‘native’ traditions. But Heile does not really convince that any of these traditions are other than relatively peripheral, or simply (as in Finland and Japan) ‘later developments' which begat a range of composers who became important parts of international scenes. A case such as that of Julio Estrada from Mexico, cited by Heile in this respect, is really about a particular individual; the same applies, for example, to Vinko Globokar from Slovenia, Horatiu Radulescu from Romania or Isang Yun from South Korea. One role of such strong compositional personalities was as mediators between the national and international scenes, and this might be the most straightforward explanation for the relative marginalization of some nations lacking such figures.

Heile chooses countries which all have particular kinds of histories of interactions with the West. It would be considerably harder to derive a global picture of musical modernism if the focus were on Trinidad, French Guiana, Bolivia, Mauritania, Syria, Kenya, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Laos and Fiji (similarly, I suspect that Iddon's theories might have come out quite differently if his case studies were the Aldeburgh Festival, the East German Festival des Politischen Liedes, the Tokyo Summer Festival and the Bang on a Can Festival in New York). Furthermore, Heile essentially categorizes as modernist those composers who adopted dodecaphony/serialism or other techniques associated with the post-1945 avant-garde. But other approaches with distinct pre-1945 histories, not least neoclassicism, have as much reason to be conceived as ‘modernist’, and so I would interpret Heile's dichotomy between Ginastera and Paz in Argentina in the 1950s as one between two different wings of modernism. A more far-reaching global model might have a stronger focus on ways in which Western music modernism has drawn upon ideas, materials and more from non-Western cultures (and not just from other music),Footnote ⁹⁵ or on where there are considerable aesthetic and technical commonalities between Western modernists and those in other musical traditions.

Can some popular idioms or manifestations thereof be considered modernist, or do they simply engage in dialogue with modernist music, which itself remains a distinct entity? Stephen Graham (‘Modernism for and of the Masses? On Popular Modernisms’, pp. 239–57) extends considerably the work of other scholars who have explored the interactions of modernism and popular culture,Footnote ⁹⁶ together with leftist writers such as Ben Watson and Mark Fisher, to develop a conception of ‘popular modernism’. This type of modernism lies between the two realms, evinces a critical relationship with the social/cultural context it inhabits (theorized in terms of specific aspects of the musical material in examples from Kurt Weill, to the ‘no wave’ movement of late 1970s New York, to Kanye West), but inevitably operates within the particular commercial conditions common to much popular music. This model is powerful, though may overstate the socially ‘critical’ aspect of modernism. The broad conception of modernism of Harper-Scott may need to include almost all popular music as well; even without going this far, there is a case for incorporating a good deal more (especially jazz) than is encompassed by Graham's ‘underground’ aesthetic.

As mentioned earlier, many have criticized the alleged elitism and even disdain towards democracy in general on the part of many modernist artists. Robert Adlington (‘Modernism: The People's Music?’, pp. 216–38) draws upon Rachel Potter's model of dual genealogies of modernism within early twentieth-century American literature,Footnote ⁹⁷ whereby one of these, represented by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, is presented as hostile towards a mass public, believing that thinking artists should have a legislative role; while the other, associated with Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein and Mina Loy, supposedly champions less authoritarian values, self-expression and the popular voice. Potter problematizes these tendencies, but others have done so more cogently: Raymond Williams, in particular, asked whether modernism implied an art which stood outside money and commerce, or a revolutionary force for popular consciousness.Footnote ⁹⁸ Adlington believes that many commentators on the first of Potter's genealogies, including Peter Franklin, Taruskin and Earle, tend to erase democratizing and popular-revolutionary tendencies within modernism, but his examples are mixed. He cites Luigi Russolo's view of music singing of the ‘tides of revolution in the modern capitals’, but without registering Russolo's proximity to Filippo Marinetti or that of futurism to fascism (despite elsewhere alluding to related issues for Alfredo Casella), considerations that are still often bracketed out from studies of this movement,Footnote ⁹⁹ not least by Russolo scholars who have falsely claimed him to have been an anti-fascist.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Constructivism declared ‘unconditional war on art’; Tristan Tzara argued that the Cabaret Voltaire was bringing ‘new art to the greatest number of people’; German Dada was linked to Communism; and the Bauhaus rejected an esoteric, socially disengaged role for the artist, while post-1945 experimental activities of dérive (defined by Guy Debord as ‘rapid passage through varied ambiences’)Footnote ¹⁰¹ and happening sought to abolish the separation of art from everyday life. Depending upon one's perspective, these may have been laudable aims, but here Adlington does not ask about the extent to which they succeeded: how many people came to the Cabaret Voltaire, compared with other artistic events in wartime Switzerland? Similarly, when the free jazz musicians of the New York Black Arts Movement claimed that their work was a ‘reflection of the negro people as a social and cultural phenomenon’ which would ‘liberate America aesthetically and socially from its inhumanity’, did they achieve such an end any more than Motown, say, with which this movement was contemporary?

Claims for the inseparability of musical and social revolution have been commonplace throughout the twentieth century, as have revolutionary or anti-hegemonic claims for music such as those cited with a healthy scepticism by Adlington, from Boulez and Cage to Lachenmann and Eddie Prévost. A tradition of work by Lachenmann, N. A. Huber, Mathias Spahlinger and others has been identified with ‘critical composition’.Footnote ¹⁰² Adlington asks whether the declared prerequisite of ‘critical listening’, and other demands made of listeners, might actually make the work most exclusionary of all except to those with highly advanced educational backgrounds, and draws attention to the lack of evidence of the work achieving its self-declared ends. He also is not prepared simply to take some of the anti-bourgeois shock tactics of certain modern art at face value, citing Williams again on how these can as often be the product of aristocratic disdain as entail a commitment to the cause of the proletariat.

For Adlington, strategies of resistance are better pursued through some engagement with, rather than complete rejection of, mass culture. Examples he gives include bebop, which maintained a degree of autonomy from the entertainment industry and the racial stereotypes it imposes upon black musicians, without operating wholly outside this industry (somewhat akin to Graham's ‘popular modernisms’). The Chicago jazz collective AACM sought a popularity independently of industry manipulations, although it is not clear that it did or could achieve this, rather than simply working with more niche sections of that industry. Free improvisers and their acolytes have regularly touted emancipatory claims for their work, such as that ‘it can't be bought and sold by capitalism’, but as Adlington points out, when concert tickets and recordings are bought and sold, or publicity and circulation achieved through global corporations, this is also an impossible ideal.

There are more generous interpretations to be considered if one is prepared to allow alternatives to stark categories of revolutionary/‘democratic’ art versus ivory-tower elitism. Composers of highly advanced modernist music such as Lachenmann, Huber and Spahlinger were never likely to have a mass impact without deep changes in the majority of listeners' musical education; but their work, alongside that of many others in different art forms, may have played some small part in a wider pluralist critical intellectual culture in post-war Germany as a vital alternative to the corrosion of this under fascism. Such a culture might play some part in making fascism less likely to grow again. Other modernist art may not change the world, but can add to the range of experiences, ideas, sensations available in that world and thus cement a more pluralistic culture than if all such things were at the mercy of market forces. A mature democratic politics allows minority voices to be heard, in comparison with right- or left-wing populism which allows only a singular voice of ‘the people’, all else dismissed as the view of ‘elites’, as mentioned earlier in this article.Footnote ¹⁰³ Jacques Rancière, cited by Adlington, dismissed the idea of an ‘original “people”’ or ‘original popular will’, but still maintained the notion of some anti-hegemonic ‘power of anybody’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Intellectual and cultural pluralism are themselves antidotes to hegemonic culture, and their democratic value should not be underestimated.

A thoroughgoing re-examination of the concept of modernism and its application, intellectual history and periodization (not to mention associated historiography, which space has not allowed me to consider here) opens up the possibility of further writing which might address historical and aesthetic questions in surprisingly new ways. The Routledge Research Companion to Modernism in Music – together with other related recent work – goes some way towards preparing the ground for this, although because of the inevitable limitations of large multi-authored volumes, it entails differing degrees of critical questioning of inherited assumptions. Beyond attempts to nuance and enrich the concept of modernism, some fearless scholars might consider whether the concept itself is necessarily worth preserving in such a form or whether some modified terminology (or reversion to autonomous and often antagonistic subcategories, as implied by Perry Anderson in his critique of Marshall Berman)Footnote ¹⁰⁵ might prove more enlightening.