The Revolt in Music and Dance

“Astonish me!” was the motto of modern dance and music, both of which shocked audiences in the concert halls of Europe. American dancer Isadora Duncan took Europe by storm at the turn of the twentieth century when, draped in a flowing garment, she appeared barefoot in one of the first performances of modern dance. Her sophisticated style was called “primitive” because it no longer followed the steps of classical ballet. Experimentation with forms of bodily expression animated the Russian Ballet’s 1913 performance of The Rite of Spring, by Igor Stravinsky, the tale of an orgiastic dance to the death performed to ensure a plentiful harvest. The dance troupe struck awkward poses and danced to rhythms intended to sound primitive. At the work’s premiere in Paris, one journalist reported that “the audience began shouting its indignation. . . . Fighting actually broke out among some of the spectators.”

Composers had been rebelling against Western traditions for several decades, producing music that was disturbing rather than pretty. Having heard Asian musicians at international expositions, French composer Claude Debussy transformed his style to reflect non-European musical patterns and wrote articles in praise of Asian harmonies. Italian composer Giacomo Puccini used non-Western subject matter for his opera Madame Butterfly, which debuted in 1904. Listeners were jarred when they heard non-Western tonalities. Like the bizarre representation of reality in cubism, the works of Austrian composer Richard Strauss added to the revolution in music by using several musical keys simultaneously, thus distorting familiar musical patterns. The early orchestral work of Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg, who also wrote cabaret music to earn a living, shocked even Strauss. Schoenberg proposed eliminating tonality altogether; a decade later, he devised a new twelve-tone scale. “I am aware of having broken through all the barriers of a dated aesthetic ideal,” Schoenberg wrote of his music. Audiences, however, found this music unpleasant and incomprehensible. “Anarchist! Nihilist!” they shouted, using political terms to show their distaste for modernist music.