In the current anniversary-fest the musical world has awarded itself there is an omission which dwarfs the lot of them. This is the invention of what many people still call ‘modern music’. For it was in 1909 that Schoenberg wrote his Five Orchestral Pieces and the monodrama Erwartung. These were early atonal works which used such a fantastic variety of harmony, rhythm, and colour, and took place at such an intense emotional level, that they first justified the use of the term ‘expressionist’. Roger Fry had just coined this term, also in 1909, in order to establish a contrast with the passivity of Impressionism.
The term modern music is still indelibly associated with the early experiments of Schoenberg; and it was an invention. He worked out a system for destroying tonality, called Twelve-note composition, which established dissonance as the core of the musical language to be employed.
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