List of modernist composers

The following is a list of modernist composers.

In music, modernism is an aesthetic stance underlying the period of change and development in musical language that occurred around the turn of the 20th century, a period of diverse reactions in challenging and reinterpreting older categories of music, innovations that led to new ways of organizing and approaching harmonic, melodic, sonic, and rhythmic aspects of music, and changes in aesthetic worldviews in close relation to the larger identifiable period of modernism in the arts of the time. The operative word most associated with it is "innovation".^[1] Its leading feature is a "linguistic plurality", which is to say that no one music genre ever assumed a dominant position.^[2]

Inherent within musical modernism is the conviction that music is not a static phenomenon defined by timeless truths and classical principles, but rather something which is intrinsically historical and developmental. While belief in musical progress or in the principle of innovation is not new or unique to modernism, such values are particularly important within modernist aesthetic stances.

— Edward Campbell (2010, p. 37) [emphasis added]

Examples include the celebration of Arnold Schoenberg's rejection of tonality in chromatic post-tonal and twelve-tone works and Igor Stravinsky's move away from metrical rhythm.^[3]

This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by adding missing items with reliable sources.

Australia

Australia

• Roy Agnew (1891–1944)^[4]
• Arthur Benjamin (1893–1960)^[4]
• Hooper Brewster-Jones (1887–1949)^[4]
• Peggy Glanville-Hicks (1912–1990)^[4]
• Percy Grainger (1882–1961)^[5][6]
• Margaret Sutherland (1897–1984)^[4]

Europe

Austria

• Alban Berg (1885–1935)^[7]
• Ernst Krenek (1900–1991)
• Gustav Mahler (1860–1911)^[8]
• Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951)^[9]
• Anton Webern (1883–1945)
• Alexander Zemlinsky (1871–1942)^[10]

Belgium

• Karel Goeyvaerts (1923–1993)^[11]

Finland

• Erik Bergman (1911–2006)^[12]
• Aarre Merikanto (1893–1958)^[13]

France

• Claude Debussy (1862–1918)^[14]
• André Jolivet (1905–1974)^[15]
• Charles Koechlin (1867–1950)
• Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992)^[14]
• Darius Milhaud (1892–1974)^[14]
• Francis Poulenc (1899–1963)^[16]
• Maurice Ravel (1875–1937)^[14]
• Erik Satie (1866–1925)^[14]
• Edgard Varèse (1883–1965)^[14]

Germany

• Paul Hindemith (1895–1963)^[17]
• Hans Pfitzner (1869–1949)^[18]
• Max Reger (1873–1916)^[10][19]
• Franz Schreker (1878–1934)^[10]
• Richard Strauss (1864–1949)^[10][20]

Greece

• Nikos Skalkottas (1904–1949)

Hungary

• Béla Bartók (1881–1945)^[14]

Italy

• Ferruccio Busoni (1866–1924)^[21]

Poland

• Karol Szymanowski (1882–1937)^[22]

Russia

• Edison Denisov (1929–1996)
• Leo Ornstein (1893–2002)^[23]
• Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953)^[24]
• Alexander Scriabin (1872–1915)^[14]
• Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971)^[25]
• Andrei Volkonsky (1933–2008)^[26]

Switzerland

• Arthur Honegger (1892–1955)^[27]

North America

United States

• George Antheil (1900–1959)
• Milton Babbitt (1916–2011)^[28]
• Elliott Carter (1908–2012)^{[29][30][31][32]}
• Henry Cowell (1897–1965)^[33]
• Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901–1953)^[34]
• Vernon Duke (1903–1969)^[35]
• Bernard Herrmann (1911–1975)^[36]
• Charles Ives (1874–1954)^[37]
• Harry Partch (1901–1974)^[38]

See also

• Modernism (music)
• Postmodernism

References

• Ashby, Arved Mark (2004a). "Introduction". In Arved Mark Ashby (ed.). The Pleasure of Modernist Music: Listening, Meaning, Intention, Ideology. University of Rochester Press. pp. 1–22. ISBN 1-58046-143-3.
• Ashby, Arved Mark (2004b). "Modernism Goes to the Movies". In Arved Mark Ashby (ed.). The Pleasure of Modernist Music: Listening, Meaning, Intention, Ideology. University of Rochester Press. pp. 345–86. ISBN 1-58046-143-3.
• Bauer, Amy (2004). "Tone-Color, Movement, Changing Harmonic Planes': Cognition, Constraints, and Conceptual Blends in Modernist Music". In Arved Mark Ashby (ed.). The Pleasure of Modernist Music: Listening, Meaning, Intention, Ideology. University of Rochester Press. pp. 121–152. ISBN 1-58046-143-3.
• Campbell, Edward. 2010. Boulez, Music and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-86242-4.
• Dahlhaus, Carl. 1989. Nineteenth-Century Music. Translated by J. Bradford Robinson. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Frisch, Walter. 2005. German Modernism: Music and the Arts. California Studies in 20th-Century Music. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-25148-9.
• Gagné, Nicole V. (2012). Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music. Historical Dictionaries of Literature and the Arts. Lanham MD. Scarecrow Press. ISBN 9780810867659.
• Hanley, Edwin. 1954. "Chorale Variations. Johann Gottfried Walther: Meinen Jesum lass' ich nicht; Jesu meine Freude. Georg Böhm: Ach wie nichtig, ach wie flüchtig; Auf meinen lieben Gott; Herr Jesu Christ, dich zu uns wend. Finn Viderø, organ. 12" LP. Haydn HSL-3066" (record review). The Musical Quarterly 40, no. 2 (April): 289–94.
• Holden, Scott (2010). "The 'Adventures and Battles' of Vladimir Dukelsky (a.k.a. Vernon Duke)". American Music. 28 (3–Fall): 296–319. doi:10.5406/americanmusic.28.3.0297. S2CID 191312155.
• Howell, Tim (2011). "The Legacy of a Modernist". Finnish Music Quarterly (4): 38–41.
• Jurkowski, Edward (2020). The Music of Joonas Kokkonen. Routledge. ISBN 9781138621114.
• Knockaert, Yves (2005). "Vlaanderen en de nieuwe muziek". Kunstenpunt Muziek. Retrieved April 30, 2021.
• Lien, Anthony Marcus. 2002. "Against the Grain: Modernism and the American Art Song, 1900 to 1950". PhD diss. Davis: University of California, Davis.
• Metzer, David Joel. 2009. Musical Modernism at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century. Music in the Twentieth Century 26. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-51779-9.
• Morgan, Robert P. 1984. "Secret Languages: The Roots of Musical Modernism". Critical Inquiry 10, no. 3 (March): 442–461.
• Petersen, Nils Holger (June 2010). "Quotation and Framing: Re-contextualization and Intertextuality as Newness in George Crumb's Black Angels". Contemporary Music Review. 29 (3): 309–321. doi:10.1080/07494467.2010.535365. S2CID 218546107.
• Rifkin, Deborah (2006). "Making It Modern: Chromaticism and Phrase Structure in Twentieth-Century Tonal Music". Theory and Practice. 31: 133–158.
• Ross, Alex (2007). The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. New York City: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. ISBN 9780374249397.
• Schwarz, K. Robert (1990). "Process vs. Intuition in the Recent Works of Steve Reich and John Adams". American Music. 8 (3 - Autumn): 245–273. doi:10.2307/3052096. JSTOR 3052096.
• Skinner, Graeme. 2015. "Australian Musical First Modernism". In The Modernist World, edited by Stephen Ross and Allana C. Lindgren, 273–81. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-84503-8.
• Whitesell, Lloyd (2004). "Twentieth-Century Tonality, or, Breaking Up Is Hard to Do". In Arved Mark Ashby (ed.). The Pleasure of Modernist Music: Listening, Meaning, Intention, Ideology. University of Rochester Press. pp. 103–120. ISBN 1-58046-143-3.
• Wilmotte, Marie-Hélène (1994). "L'expérimental comme gage de la modernité: La Sequenza I de Luciano Berio". Les cahiers du CIREM (30–31): 71–84.

Footnotes

1. Metzer 2009, p. 3.
2. Morgan 1984, p. 443.
3. Campbell 2010, p. 37.
4. Skinner 2015, p. 275.
5. Robinson, Suzanne, and Kay Drefus (eds.). 2015. Grainger the Modernist. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Limited; Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company. pp. 3 et passim. ISBN 978-1-4724-2022-0.
6. Skinner 2015, pp. 275–7.
7. Ashby 2004a, p. 8; Ashby 2004b, p. 351.
8. Frisch 2005, pp. 182–5, 203–13; Gagné 2012, p. 178.
9. Ashby 2004a, p. 8; Whitesell 2004, p. 104.
10. Dahlhaus, Carl. 1989. Nineteenth-Century Music, translated by J. Bradford Robinson. California Studies in 19th-Century Music. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press. p. 335. ISBN 978-0-520-07644-0.
11. "Karel Goeyvaerts". Music in Belgium: Contemporary Belgian Composers. Brussels: CeBeDeM/A. Manteau Ltd. 1964. p. 71.
12. Howell 2011, passim.
13. Suilamo, Harri. 13 March 1986. “Aarre Merikanto – a battered genius". Finnish Music Quarterly.
14. Gagné 2012, p. 178.
15. Gagné 2012, p. 146.
16. Rifkin 2006, pp. 133–4, 141–3.
17. Ashby 2004a, p. 8; Gagné 2012, p. 178; Rifkin 2006, pp. 134, 157.
18. Frisch 2005, pp. 244–52.
19. Frisch 2005, pp. 139, 149, 150–4, 168–72.
20. Frisch 2005, pp. 214–44; Whitesell 2004, p. 103.
21. Frisch 2005, p. 139.
22. Ross 2007, p. 159.
23. Broyles, Michael, and Denise Von Glahn. 2007. Leo Ornstein: Modernist Dilemmas, Personal Choices. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press. pp. xvi, 119. ISBN 9780253348944.
24. Gagné 2012, p. 178; Rifkin 2006, pp. 133–41, 145–7.
25. Ashby 2004a, p. 3; Ashby 2004b, p. 351.
26. Dubinets, Elena (2010). Князь Андрей Волконский: Партитура жизни (in Russian). Moscow: РИПОЛ Классик. p. 12. ISBN 978-5-386-02153-5.
27. Rifkin 2006, p. 134.
28. Ashby 2004a, p. 8; Bauer 2004, p. 121.
29. Schiff, David. "Carter, Elliott | Grove Music". www.oxfordmusiconline.com. doi:10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.05030. ISBN 978-1-56159-263-0.
30. "Elliott Carter's Own Website Biography". Archived from the original on March 18, 2018. Retrieved March 18, 2018.
31. "Carter's Continuing Presence". NewMusicBox. November 15, 2017. Archived from the original on March 19, 2018. Retrieved March 18, 2018.
32. Carter, Elliott (2002). Elliott Carter's Own Book on Harmony. Carl Fischer, L.L.C. ISBN 9780825845949.
33. Lien 2002, p. 51.
34. Ashby 2004a, p. 3.
35. Holden 2010, p. 296.
36. Ashby 2004a, p. 8.
37. Leon Botstein. 2008. ^{[full citation needed]}.
38. Lien 2002, pp. 51–2.

Further reading

• Leon Botstein. 2001. "Modernism", Grove Music Online, edited by Laura Macy (accessed December 20, 2008), grovemusic.com (subscription access).
• Clapp, Philip Greeley. 1916. "Sebastian Bach, Modernist". Musical Quarterly 2, no. 2 (April): 295–313.
• Purdy, Daniel. 2010. Goethe Yearbook 17. New York: Camden House. ISBN 9781571134257.
• Taruskin, Richard. 2010. Oxford History of Western Music (2nd ed., Oxford University Press).
• Webster, James. 2008. "Rosen's Modernist Haydn". In Variations on the Canon: Essays on Music from Bach to Boulez in Honor of Charles Rosen on His Eightieth Birthday, edited by Robert Curry, David Gable, Robert Lewis Marshall, 283–90. Eastman Studies in Music 58. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. ISBN 9781580462853.