Modernity, the advent of “the new” in social life, has also been a recurring phenomenon in the history of Western classical music. Influential composers have framed modernity in their visions of artistic change: Monteverdi, Gluck, and Beethoven are notable examples in a recurrent if discontinuous aesthetic program. When the poems of Ossian appeared, they were themselves modern in departing from Augustan classicism to create a style based on heroic ideals, noble behavior, and sentiment (feeling). By translating these notions into musical terms following the French Revolution, Beethoven became the most modern composer of all, and with his successors in the later nineteenth century, modernity was condensed into its artistic agency, namely modernism. Recently, both Wagner and Brahms have been proposed as the precursors of a musical modernism. Composers of the twentieth century were only freed from overripe Romanticism by such as Scriabin and Debussy, who evolved complex harmonies that could be relished for their own sake, for the resonance of their overtones. Debussy's L'après-midi d'un faune (1894), Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra (1912), and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (1913) marked the rupture with the Romantic past. The Soviet Revolution of 1917 then created a radically new context for composers who fell under its influence.

At the time, Schoenberg had broken with the past by rethinking tonal architecture, but did so only after he had shaken off the influence of Wagner, Mahler, and Strauss (though not that of Brahms). Before he had reached that point, he was sufficiently captivated by Herder's “Darthula's Grabesgesang” to draft an extensive sketch for a cantata (1903) on these Ossian-inspired verses, which were, by that time, well known in the German-speaking world. He left the work unfinished to complete his grandiose cantata on a “Nordic” theme, the Gurrelieder, begun in 1901. Perhaps the forces of modernity, in relation to his Herder cantata, were more demanding than he had anticipated. At any rate, by the time the Gurrelieder had reached performance in 1913, Schoenberg's idiom had changed radically, abandoning late Romanticism to embrace new pitch concepts in works such as the Five Orchestral Pieces and Pierrot Lunaire, op. 20 (also 1912).