The new languages for art were unquestionably (and unapologetically) difficult. To this day, few people understand Finnegans Wake. Avant-garde music became detached from the concert- and opera-going public, and hence abstracted from a base in society.

At the same time, the modernists’ concentration on artistic materials led to abstraction of another kind, the separation of technique from expression. This emphasis on technique was welcomed by some as a relief from the overheated emotionality of the late Romantic music of Tchaikovsky, Mahler, and the like. Especially in the 1920s, “objectivity” was an ideal espoused by many artists. Only too often, their works struck the public as cold, dry, and unengaging.

Characteristic of this phase of the avant-garde was the use of schematic, even mathematical devices in the arts. The Dutch painter Piet Mondrian made pictures out of straight lines at right angles to one another and juxtaposed planes of bright color. Among composers, Igor Stravinsky was known for his provocative statements extolling objectivity and attacking Romantic music — and certainly the brisk, mechanistic rhythms that characterize Stravinsky’s style are diametrically opposed to rubato (see page 227), the rhythmic stretching that contributes so much to nineteenth-century music’s emotionality.

Several lesser composers, fascinated by machine rhythms, even tried to evoke machinery in their works: the American George Antheil (Ballet mécanique), the Russian A. V. Mosolov (The Iron Foundry), and the Swiss Arthur Honegger (Pacific 231 — a locomotive). An Italian group called the Futurists — more famous for their well-publicized proclamations than for any actual music — called for “music of the machine age” and composed with industrial noises. They invented a mechanized “noise intoner” with dozens of categories ranging from explosions and crashes to crackles and howls.