Short writing assignment: Nationalism in music Definition Generalized use of musical ideas or motifs in Western music specifically arising

in the 19th and the 20th centuries that aims at reflecting the image one has of a nation. If music has always exhibited local or national traits, the 19th and the 20th centuries saw a greater use of this material to serve political nationalism, that is the building of the image of a nation. The major reasons for the rise of the nationalism and its musical corollary were social and technical changes, such as the rise of the bourgeoisie and the development of print culture, and the growth of political movements for independence and self0determination. Musically speaking, this meant a return to the past and a concern for history, with an emphasis laid on language the assertion of differentiation and exclusion and the use of folklore/folk material in a great variety of musical genres. It was polemical at its time, as it confronted the classical notion of universalism, and because nationalism partakes from the realm of the ideational, the use of these ideas and motifs as well as their interpretation varied according to the composer, the country, the artistic movement it served, and the time of creation and interpretation. This accounts for the numerous subtypes of nationalism, such as export nationalism, colonist nationalism or tourist nationalism. Modernism

http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article /grove/music/40625?source=omo_t237&source=omo_ gmo&source=omo_t114&search=quick&q=modernism &pos=1&_start=1#firsthit In music, it identifies a compositional style which prevails in the beginning of 20th century. The term also encompasses to other trends such as aesthetic theory, scholarship and performing practice. Many composers believed that at the 20th century, musical expression must become adequate to the unique and radical character of the age The word Modernism has functioned throughout the century both polemically and analytically; although it is applied loosely to disparate musical styles, what links its many strands is a common debt to the historical context from which it emerged. http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article /opr/t114/e4473?source=omo_t237&source=omo_gmo &source=omo_t114&search=quick&q=modernism&pos =2&_start=1#firsthit

A current compositional thought and practice characterized by innovation. Modernism was in evidence as an idea and as a term by the second decade of the 20th century, in association with Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring (1913), with Schoenberg's move into atonality (in about 1908), with the music of the Italian Futurists and Russian followers of Skryabin, and with Busoni's Sketch for a New Aesthetic of Music (1907). But although so many new hopes and endeavours were born at the same time, there was no unanimity of motivation or outlook. For some composers, for instance Varse and the Futurists, new musical means were necessary at a time when human life was being revolutionized by electricity, by motor transport, and indeed by Revolution, for there was a strong belief in artistic modernism in some quarters in the new USSR. For others, new techniques were needed for expressive purposes, to intensify and characterize images more sharply (Schoenberg), or to venture into transcendence (Skryabin). The new might also be a means of rediscovering the primitive (Stravinsky) or a necessary advance, part of the progress inherent in the great tradition (as was Schoenberg's stated view). In the later 1920s, and especially in the 30s, modernism seemed a spent force. That

changed, however, after World War II, when a new generation of composers Boulez, Barraqu, Babbitt,Nono, Stockhausen, Xena kisbegan making new starts on the basis of the most forward-looking music of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Webern, and Varse. Again, the period of rapid change was quite brief, lasting no more than a decade or so, and again the rationales and results were various, though this time there was a lasting effect, in the work of composers taking their bearings from the modernists of the 1910s and 50s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernism_(music)

In music, the term "modernism" refers generally to the significant departures in musical language that occurred at or around the beginning of the 20th century, creating new understandings of harmonic, melodic, sonic, and rhythmic aspects of music. The operative word most associated with it is "innovation" (Metzer 2009, 3). Its leading feature is a "linguistic plurality", which is to say that no one musical language ever assumed a dominant position (Morgan 1984, 443). Musicologist Carl Dahlhaus restricted his definition of musical modernism to progressive music in the period 18901910:

The year 1890...lends itself as an obvious point of historical discontinuity....The "breakthrough" Mahler, Strauss and Debussy implying a profound historical transformation....If we were to search for a name to convey the breakaway mood of the 1890s (a mood symbolized musically by the opening bars of Strauss's Don Juan) but without imposing a fictitious unity of style on the age, we could do worse than revert to [the] term "modernism" extending (with some latitude) from the 1890 to the beginnings of our own twentieth-century modern music in 1910....The label "late romanticism"...is a terminological blunder of the first order and ought to be abandoned forthwith. It is absurd to yoke Strauss, Mahler, and the young Schoenberg, composers who represent modernism in the minds of their turn-of-thecentury contemporaries, with the self-proclaimed antimodernist Pfitzner, calling them all "late romantics" in order to supply a veneer of internal unity to an age fraught with stylistic contradictions and conflicts. (Dahlhaus 1989, 334) Leon Botstein, on the other hand, asserts that musical modernism is characterized by "a conception of modernity dominated by the progress of science, technology and industry, and by positivism, mechanization, urbanization, mass culture and nationalism", an aesthetic reaction to which "reflected not only enthusiasm but ambivalence and anxiety" (Botstein 2007).

Other writers regard musical modernism as an historical period extending from about 1890 to 1930, and apply the term "postmodernism" to the period after that year (Karolyi 1994, 135; Meyer 1994, 331 32). Still other writers assert that modernism is not attached to any historical period, but rather is "an attitude of the composer; a living construct that can evolve with the times" (McHard 2008, 14).