Modernism
The 10 Best Modernism
Tracks of All Time
Western art music after tonality stopped being compulsory. Atonality, serial method, noise admitted as material, and eventually silence — a century of composers deciding which inherited rule to stop obeying next.
- Origin
- Vienna, Paris and New York, 1908
- Also known as
- twentieth century classical, serialism, second viennese school, avant-garde, contemporary classical
- Tracks
- 10
- Updated
- 2026-08-30
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Number 1: Igor Stravinsky / The Rite of Spring
1913
The premiere ended in a riot, which has slightly obscured the fact that the rhythmic writing is still the most violent thing in the orchestral repertoire. Nothing has caught up.
Number 2: Arnold Schoenberg / Pierrot lunaire
1912
Twenty-one poems delivered in Sprechstimme — neither spoken nor sung — over five players. Unsettling in a way that has not worn off in a century of trying.
Number 4: Olivier Messiaen / Quatuor pour la fin du temps
1941
Written and first performed in a prisoner-of-war camp, for the four instruments available. Birdsong, non-retrogradable rhythm, and an unembarrassed faith that the circumstances make impossible to patronise.
Number 5: Alban Berg / Wozzeck
1922
Atonal opera about a soldier destroyed by poverty and humiliation, built on strict classical forms nobody in the audience can hear. Berg proved the new language could carry a story.
Number 6: Béla Bartók / Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta
1936
A fugue that expands outwards in semitones from a single note, and a night-music slow movement of extraordinary strangeness. Folk research and mathematics, in the same piece.
Number 7: Krzysztof Penderecki / Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima
1960
Fifty-two strings playing clusters, glissandi and things not previously notated. Penderecki originally called it 8'37" and gave it the title only after hearing what he had written.
Number 8: Dmitri Shostakovich / Symphony No. 5
1937
Written under real threat of arrest and subtitled, by someone, a Soviet artist's reply to just criticism. Whether the triumphant ending is sincere is the most consequential unanswered question in music.
Number 9: Iannis Xenakis / Metastaseis
1954
Sixty-one players on sixty-one separate parts, the string glissandi drawn as the ruled surfaces Xenakis was designing with Le Corbusier at the time. Architecture, performed.
Number 10: Luigi Russolo / Risveglio di una città
1913
Written for intonarumori — noise machines Russolo built himself — after a manifesto arguing that industrial noise was the only honest material left. Thirty-five years early, and completely correct.