The Great Darkness: Romanticism in the Mid-20th Century

Younger Romantic composers today may not understand the virulent anti-Romanticism and opposition to tonal composition that pervaded the musical establishment in the middle decades of the twentieth century, roughly from 1925 to 1975.

For reasons I outlined in an earlier post, the human ear has a natural predisposition to recognize and exploit tonal relationships. Therefore true atonality can be realized only by consciously rejecting tonality. A method for avoiding tonality was advanced most notably by Arnold Schoenberg in 1921. This “twelve-tone technique” was designed to ensure the all twelve pitch classes were given equal weight and none was heard as more central than the others. By mid-century this basic idea had been expanded to include elements other than pitch (such as duration and dynamics), developing into “total serialism.”

The effect was the production of compositions heard as random, patternless sounds. Of course, serialism was using patterns, but these could naturally be experienced only visually, by looking at the scores. Music, however, is an auditory medium, and within that medium serialism was ultimately an abstract system of enforced sterility, devoid of humanness and life. The method not only suppressed tonality, but also the Romantic element in music; at best, serialism could be combined with superficial imitations of the gestures of Romanticism, as in the works of Alban Berg, to project an artificial, empty semblance of pathos. In academia and fashionable centers for “serious” music, applied mathematics replaced the creative and human element.

Of course, one could also produce patternless “music” by using chance to determine the process by which music was composed or produced, in much the same way that an avant-garde painter might toss paint randomly at a canvas. Such “aleatoric” methods were favored by the highly influential mid-century composer John Cage. This was not only a world in which young composers were expected to eschew any vestage of tonality and to abandon outmoded notions of beauty in melody and harmony, but also one in which a Cage work consisting of four minutes and 33 seconds of silence was acclaimed by the musical establishment as a brilliant stroke of pure genius. (In the latter case, no one was listening — literally.) Few had the courage to say aloud that the emperor had no clothes.

The human mind thrives on the recognition of patterns, along with the human elements that can be conveyed through musical patterns, and audiences were driven away by the incomprehensible “serious music” of the time.  They turned instead to the popular music of the time — swing, jazz, and rock. Even if this pop music did not always attain the highest levels of art, it at least projected life, energy, and vitality. It was music with a soul.

In retrospect, it is not hard to understand why the mid-twentieth century was so profoundly anti-Romantic. Romanticism gives primacy to the human individual, and there was little room for humanism or individualism in an age that saw two world wars, the rise of Nazism, Communism and other oppressive regimes across the globe, concentration camps and gulags, the Cold War, and McCarthyism.

The closing decades of the century, however, saw some abatement in the intense opposition to Romanticism in academia and the “serious music” community. Scholarship into previously shunned composers like Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff became acceptable, and young composers might grudgingly be permitted to write in a Romantic (or at least, quasi-Romantic) style. Today, although musical academia continues today to indulge in a peculiar fascination with the avant-garde (meaning those who fantasize themselves to be the true representatives of the future), those who seek to explore the remaining untapped potential of Romanticism nevertheless enjoy widespread acceptance.