ABSTRACT
The conductor Sir Simon Rattle’s television series about twentieth century art music, and accompanying book (Hall, 1996), has the intriguing title of Leaving Home. The underlying metaphor is explained thus: ‘It has been a century of emigration and exile, both voluntary and forced. But “leaving home” is also the dominant metaphor for a time in which all the certainties, social, political and artistic have migrated’ (Hall, 1996: 1). The author admits that ‘Beginnings can be deceptive’ and the twentieth century ‘began in a state of relative calm’ (Hall, 1996: 1). After all, the era just before and immediately after the beginning of the century was known as the ‘Belle Epoque’ and the artistic ‘culture was still bourgeois, the musical style Romantic’ (Hall, 1996: 1). Yet underneath the surface lay a certain uncertainty concerning the effects of new scientific and technological developments (i.e., the motor car, airplane, telephone, cinema, gramophone, X-ray, etc.). Additionally, the new physics undermined ‘Newton’s theory that the world was stable and mechanically ordered’; while the birth of psychoanalysis led to the view that the ‘irrational nature of the unconscious might … be as important in human behavior as the conscious mind’ (Hall, 1996: 2). However, why music and ‘leaving home’? Music provides an ideal meta-
phor for this process because, in the first decade of the century, there was a significant retreat from the principle of tonality and regular pulse. It was the ‘wish to explore worlds lying outside normal experience’ that led to the abandonment of tonality and to an ‘unprecedented importance to rhythm’ (Hall, 1996: 3). Around 1900, composers started – essentially for the first time – to seriously question the humanistic and rationalist cosmology that had prevailed since the Renaissance. In the tonal system, human beings were still ‘in harmony with themselves and the world, while at the same time being expressive and dynamically purposeful’ (Hall, 1996: 3). Whether we are speaking of Arnold Schoenberg’s 1909 melodrama Erwartung, which attempts to capture the inner turmoil of a ‘woman searching for her lover,’ or Igor Stravinsky’s re-creation of a ‘barbaric, pagan world’ in the 1913 ballet score for the Rite of Spring, the tonal system ‘proved unsuitable for those who wanted to look at human experience from another perspective’ (Hall, 1996: 3).
