Reaction

In 1913 dapper, wiry Russian Igor Stravinsky scandalized conservative audiences with a boisterous, cacophonous ballet, Le Sacre du Printemps, in which the time-honored conventions of melodic form often gave way to an ingenious concatenation of non-musical sounds. Four years previously a morose, bald-pated Viennese named Arnold Schoenberg had issued his Five Pieces for Orchestra and Three Piano Pieces to a musical world already slightly deafened by the acrid harmonies of his previous works. Composer Schoenberg's two opuses were the first examples of systematic "atonality." To Composer Schoenberg the laws by which notes follow and precede each other had become arbitrary suppositions. By his new theory of atonality, all notes were created free & equal; the sequence in which they followed each other was merely a matter of taste. An atonal melody was governed, not by the rules of musical syntax, but by the rules of eeny, meeny, miney, mo. Composer Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps became the most imitated composition of its period; Composer Schoenberg's declaration of independence influenced nearly half the younger composers of Europe.

In the 1920s the tide of musical revolution hit U. S. shores and modernism half-drowned the U. S. intelligentsia. Modernist music was featured prominently on symphonic programs from coast to coast.

But before the promised new era was well launched in Europe, musical modernism was in trouble with the dictators, who objected to it as: 1) extreme individualism, 2) an unsettling symptom of unrest. In 1936 Soviet Russia joined the procession, banning as "leftist" the works of Dmitri Shostakovich, and declaring that the "formalistic ideas" of modernistic music were "founded on bourgeois musical conceptions" (TIME, Feb. 24, 1936).

Last week, as Manhattan's Philharmonic-Symphony and other U. S. orchestras ended their winter symphonic seasons, it became apparent that the trend away from modernism was also affecting U. S. concert programs. Of the 41 compositions by contemporary composers performed last season by the Philharmonic-Symphony, only six or seven showed modernistic tendencies. Compared with programs of ten years ago the past season in Manhattan, Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago showed an appreciable decline in the number of modernist composers represented. Since 1935 activities of Manhattan's League of Composers, modernism's principal U. S. stronghold, have fallen off sharply.

Among the big figures of the modernist musical movement, many, including Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Prokofieff, are today writing a much milder and more melodious type of music than they were in modernism's heyday. In a current article in Musical America Atonalist Ernest Krenek sighed for the good old days of musical revolution. Wailed Composer Krenek: "Moderns are saying atonality is passe. Most contemporary music is reactionary."

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