The Crisis of Tonality

The shift in focus from artistic material as a potential to a particular material's own will is also discernable in 20th-century music. The most important distinction between music and other forms of art is that music is an auditory experience of sound. Sound in itself is thus often regarded as the basic ingredient in musical material. Music history offers several examples of the desire to explore sound an sich: see Webern's Klangfarbenmelodie, Varèse's efforts to achieve “the liberation of sound,” Schaeffer's musique concrète, various experiments in sound within the frame of traditional music ensembles, the unconventional use of conventional instruments, and electroacoustic as well as computer-generated music, to mention just a few. Like dissonance, sound has been emancipated, which has strengthened its identity and position as an essential component in music's basic material. Recognition of this fact has been a major catalyst in the development of present compositional diversity. Nonetheless, the views on music's fundamental material have been far from unambiguous: It has never been an easy matter to distinguish any potential in the material from an alleged will. Furthermore, different works of music described as “contemporary” in the 20th century may cover a broad and highly varied range of attitudes to sound.

In the era of Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) and Paul Hindemith (1895-1963), the common concept of musical material comprised a combination of what were considered the main elements of music: melody, harmony, and rhythm. In his book The Beautiful in Music (Vom Musikalisch-Schönen. Ein Beitrag zur Revision der Ästhetik der Tonkunst, 1854), Eduard Hanslick defines material in a way that represents such a view:

In Hanslick's opinion, the range of notes is a horizontal and vertical potential that may be realized in rhythm. Thus tones and their possibilities constitute the material of music. However, the tones must be refined to a level where their possibilities are implicit.