Twentieth-century breaks: Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Bartók

At the start of the 20th century Europe went through an unprecedented acceleration: electricity, cars, aeroplanes, cinema, then the First World War. The arts were looking for new languages: Picasso's Cubism, Kandinsky's abstraction, Freud's psychoanalysis in Vienna. In music three figures embody three different breaks: Schoenberg questioned tonality, Stravinsky turned rhythm into a raw force, Bartók went to the villages in search of a music older than the Europe of salons.

Schoenberg: the end of tonality

For almost three centuries Western music had rested on tonality: a central note (the tonic) and chords that create tension and then resolve. In Wagner, Mahler or Strauss, chromaticism had stretched the system so far that it seemed about to give way. Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), a Viennese, began in the late-Romantic vein, then took the leap around 1908–1909: his music became atonal, with no tonic and no hierarchy among the notes. In 1912 Pierrot lunaire introduced a voice halfway between singing and speaking, called Sprechgesang.

To organise this freedom, Schoenberg developed the twelve-tone method in the early 1920s: the twelve notes of the chromatic scale are placed in a fixed order, the row, which provides the material for the whole work. His pupils Alban Berg (the opera Wozzeck, premiered in 1925) and Anton Webern (pieces of extreme concision) formed with him what is called the "Second Viennese School". An example of a row and how to manipulate it appears in the lesson The piano in the 20th century.

Stravinsky: the shock of rhythm

Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971), a Russian pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov, wrote three ballets for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Paris that made him famous: The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911) and The Rite of Spring. The premiere of the Rite, on 29 May 1913 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, caused an uproar that became legendary. What shocked people: hammered chords, unpredictable accents, metres that change almost every bar, short melodies drawn from Russian folk music repeated like incantations.

Here is the principle of changing metres, in an example written for this lesson (not a quotation): the basic pulse (the eighth note) stays fixed, but the groups lengthen and shorten without warning.

M:2/4
L:1/8
Q:1/8=240
K:C
!>!c2 e g | [M:3/8] !>!f e d | [M:2/4] !>!c B c d | [M:5/8] !>!e2 !>!d c B | [M:3/8] !>!c3 |]

In Petrushka Stravinsky also superimposes two distant keys (this is called polytonality). The idea is easy to try at the piano: the right hand plays an F-sharp major chord, the left hand a C major chord (a generic example):

M:4/4
L:1/4
Q:1/4=90
%%staves {RH LH}
V:RH clef=treble
V:LH clef=bass
K:C
[V:RH] ^c ^A ^F ^A | ^c2 ^f2 |]
[V:LH] [C,E,G,]2 [C,E,G,]2 | [C,E,G,]4 |]

After the war Stravinsky changed course: with Pulcinella (1920) he revisited 18th-century music with modern harmonies. This was neoclassicism, which Prokofiev, Poulenc and Hindemith also followed. Stravinsky reinvented himself all his life, even adopting serial technique in the 1950s.

Bartók: folk music in depth

From 1905 Béla Bartók (1881–1945) travelled the countryside of Hungary, Romania and Slovakia, often with his friend Zoltán Kodály, carrying a wax-cylinder phonograph. He recorded thousands of peasant songs and transcribed them with scientific precision. In them he found old modes, asymmetric rhythms (metres of 5, 7 or 9 beats) and melodies that had nothing to do with the "Hungarian" salon tunes popular in the 19th century. This material fed his whole output: the Romanian Folk Dances, the Mikrokosmos for piano, his six string quartets, the Concerto for Orchestra (1943).

What to listen for

• Atonality (Schoenberg, Berg, Webern): no "home" note to which everything returns; tense intervals, sharply contrasting expressive gestures.
• Driving rhythm (Stravinsky, Bartók): displaced accents, changing metres, stubborn ostinatos, prominent percussion.
• Folk colours (Bartók, Kodály): old modes, short repeated melodies, irregular dance rhythms.
• Neoclassicism: old forms (suite, concerto grosso), clear textures, but chords that deliberately "grate".

Listening list

• Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring, Petrushka, The Soldier's Tale.
• Schoenberg: Verklärte Nacht (still tonal), Pierrot lunaire; Berg: Violin Concerto.
• Bartók: Romanian Folk Dances, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, Concerto for Orchestra.