In a search for intensified emotional and evocative music, a major impulse was the addition of notes outside the traditional scale, chromatic half tones, which at color and variety to the tonal palette. The important German Romantic composer, Richard Wagner, put particular stresses on traditional harmony to the point where in his Tristan and Isolde (1859) the chromatic additions to the texture destabilized any traditional sense of harmonic progression. The famous “Tristan chord”, which sounds at the very beginning of the prelude and throughout the entire opera, is formed of a combination of partial chords, which could not be analyzed or situated in traditional harmony. Wagner, in seeking for the continuously yearning but unsatisfied love of his characters, created a destabilized harmonic texture that both frustrates traditional tonal expectations, and yet deepens the sense of the psychological and mythic energies within his characters and story. While Tristan and Isolde was viewed as a virtually impossible piece of music when first introduced, it came to be seen as the harbinger of the changes in musical texture and tonality that would blossom into the experimental modes of early 20th Century music. Just as the task of portraying realistic surfaces in painting began to fade with the introduction of photography, so the expectations of traditional harmony and music began to fade with the influence of Wagner’s musical and psychological force.

In addition to the challenges to traditional Western harmonies represented by Wagner’s work and others, European and North American musicians were also exposed to and influenced by various examples of non-European music. The large technological and cultural exhibitions of the 19th Century, such as The Paris World’s Fair of 1889, brought chosen groups of people and artists from colonial countries to the European scene. The innovative French composer, Claude Debussy (1862-1918), encountered a Balanese Gamalon orchestra at the 1889 World’s Fair. The Gamalon orchestra, a collection of ten to twelve tuned percussion instrumentalists, offered rhythmic, tonal and harmonic achievements, which struck Debussy as works of genuine beauty. Debussy’s musical style, often called musical impressionism, incorporated aspects of Asian tonalities, sound patterns and rhythms. Just as the painters Gauguin and Picasso were fascinated with Asian and African images that they incorporated into their art, so Debussy and other composers of his day began to include elements of non-European musical culture into their own styles. In both America and Europe, the early emergence of jazz from African musical roots, had a tremendous impact at the beginning of the 20th Century and later.

With the emergence of such innovative musical styles as Wagner’s chromaticism and Debussy’s impressionism, the Western musical tradition began to explore new and radical patterns of musical expressions that parallel the innovations in Modernist visual and literary art. Probably the most famous single musical event of the Modern era was the premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, May 25th, 1913. The Rite of Spring was a ballet score for Diaghilev’s ballets Ruses in Paris. Stravinsky was inspired by a primitive story of human sacrifice for the renewal of the fertility of the land and went to Russian folk tunes and village music of the peasants that he amplified into an enormous musical work for an orchestra of more than one hundred musicians. Stravinsky’s ballet draws both on basic folk melodies and rhythms and invokes massive rhythmic and harmonic dissonances. In an attempt to find a ballet equivalent to this music, the brilliant and eccentric Nijinsky, created a ballet of rough and unsophisticated movement, completely at odds with traditional concepts of ballet. The first performance of The Rite of Spring is fabled for the riot that took place among the audience and between the audience, the musicians and the dancers. The shock of the first audience was in response to a fundamental revolution in the concept of music and its range of expression. While audiences have come to appreciate the originality and even the beauty of Stravinsky’s gargantuan score, the music retains a primal energy and hypnotic power, achieved by few works of art in the Modern world.

Where Stravinsky pushed tonality and rhythm to an immense expressivity as a revolution in music, the Austrian compose, Arnold Schoenberg, pursued first ultra-lush, late Romantic music and then in experimentation, challenged the very assumptions of the tonal arrangement of music. Where tonal music is based on home tonic notes and chords and contrasting tonalities that then return in a clear pattern to their original key, Schoenberg evolved what was called, XII-tone composition, where the hierarchy of any note over another was dissolved. The Western chromatic scale has twelve notes, and in Schoenberg’s new system, no one note was allowed to have natural priority over another one. Consequently, he evolved a system by which the musical work needed to sound all twelve chromatic notes, before repeating any other one. These tones could be arranged in any order by the composer, but the structured nature of traditional tonality was rejected by Schoenberg in this method. Schoenberg’s music in the XII-tone style has never achieved particular popularity, but his concept of composition clearly parallels the emergence of German abstract expressionism and other non-representational styles in the visual arts.

Just as with the emergence of internal monologue and temporal disjunctions in Modernist literature and the movement to non-representational visual art, the musical arts participate in experimentation, fragmentation and disquieting musical expression. There is a culture of experimentation in the arts that comes from the new technical, scientific and conceptual innovations of the previous century. It is often necessary to devote attention to Modern music to become receptive to its innovations and modes of expression. As with Modernist literature and visual art, Modern music is often seen as difficult, however, the challenge of that difficulty can lead to a broader range of experience and appreciation of Modern modes of art.