Introduction

Every generation experiences its time as modern, up to date, contemporary. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, on the other hand, witnessed the burgeoning of an unusually protracted and selfconscious interest in things new and unprecedented. This was owing in part to the global influence of industrialization, which caused many to question the relevance of traditional political, cultural, and social ideologies. As composers, artists, authors, and architects searched for a contemporary aesthetic response to their changing world, they began to reject the artistic values of the past, turning instead to more abstract forms of expression. The term most often used to identify this radical turn of the twentiethcentury trend in art and literature is modernism. Late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century modernism is rooted in a particular kind of modern experience, one whose innovative spirit, while difficult to pin down, is exceptionally earnest and trenchant.