The 10 best Modernism tracks of all time
Modernism
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.
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Igor Stravinsky / The Rite of Spring
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.
Arnold Schoenberg / Pierrot lunaire
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.
Olivier Messiaen / Quatuor pour la fin du temps
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.
Alban Berg / Wozzeck
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.
Béla Bartók / Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta
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.
Krzysztof Penderecki / Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima
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.
Dmitri Shostakovich / Symphony No. 5
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.
Iannis Xenakis / Metastaseis
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.
Luigi Russolo / Risveglio di una città
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.