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CHAPTER
12 MODERN MUSIC AND
JAZZ IN THE 1920s
B
etween the debacles of World War I and the 1929 stock market crash,
Americans enjoyed more than a decade of prosperity and technologi-
cal innovation. The ethos of the 1920s embraced an optimistic thirst for
novelty and a corresponding rejection of seemingly outmoded strictures of the
past. Nowhere was the sense of new possibilities greater than in two otherwise
dissimilar spheres of musical activity: classical music’s venture into modernism,
and the combining of blues and ragtime to create jazz.MUSICAL MODERNISM
In the years before World War I several European composers—the Austrian
Arnold Schoenberg, the Russian Igor Stravinsky, the Hungarian Béla Bartók, and
the Frenchman Erik Satie, among others—had rejected key aspects of the roman-
tic tradition, which had long dominated Western concert halls and opera houses,
in favor of new aesthetic values that came to be called modernism. The works
of these modernist composers tended to favor fragmented melodies, dissonant
harmonies, and irregular rhythms. Across the Atlantic, a movement took shape
to introduce into the concert hall music by the European modernists and their
American counterparts.
Modernist music did not conform to romantic notions of aesthetic beauty,
and most performers and audiences did not welcome it at fi rst. Nonetheless,
during the fi rst half of the twentieth century, as some of these European works
gained a foothold in American concert halls, a number of émigré and native-
born composers in the United States were embracing modernism in a spirit of
experimentation that links their work to the earlier music of Charles Ives (see
chapter 8). Though much of it still sounds surprisingly unconventional, the best
of this music has proven to have lasting value both on its own merits and through
its infl uence on later classical, jazz, and popular music.172028_12_280-304_r3_ko.indd 280 23/01/13 8:40 PM