The Modern Age

Abstract

This volume, covering music from 1918 to the present, deals with a period that we feel to be, even when viewed as a whole, in some sense distinctly our own. Thus we continue to refer to the music of the entire period as ‘contemporary’, or ‘modern’, adjectives whose meaning appears to be seriously stretched when one considers that the earliest works encompassed date back almost three-quarters of a century. In spite of its unprecedented technical, stylistic and expressive variety, however, the music of this turbulent epoch is in some significant measure all of a piece. It is this common ground, then, that this introduction attempts to survey. The individual chapters that follow, directed towards the peculiarities of distinct geographical regions and more limited time-spans, mostly stress differences in musical developments; whereas their focus is on musical life and practice as a whole, in this chapter we shall concentrate on the compositional ideas embodied in twentieth-century music itself and the relationship between these ideas and the intellectual and cultural climate of the time.