In each nation of importance for Western music during the first half of the twentieth century, there thrived a handful of potentially “great” composers: authentic candidates for recognized greatness in fine art music. In England, Ralph Vaughan-Williams, Benjamin Britten, Gustav Holst, and William Walton loomed large. In France, Maurice Ravel was still composing, while the “French Six” arose—among them Francis Poulenc, Arthur Honegger, and Darius Milhaud, with Eric Satie as their mentor. Igor Stravinsky was an expatriate in Paris.

Precommunist Russia had produced Sergei Rachmaninoff, who was then active in Europe and America, and under communism Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergey Prokofiev were at work. In Italy, Giacomo Puccini was working on one of his greatest operas, Turandot, until his death in 1923, and Pietro Mascagni’s creative period continued past the Second World War. In Germany, Richard Strauss was prolific, and Paul Hindemith became an international figure. In Vienna, the expressionist avant-garde gained intellectual supremacy through Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern. In Spain, a late-blooming nationalism produced a school of composers that included Manuel De Falla, Enrique Granados, and Joaquín Turina. Eastern Europe brought forth Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály, and Leoš Janácek. And from Finland, Jean Sibelius’s massive symphonic works began to conquer Europe and America. In the same period America also produced significant musical talent: Charles Ives, George Antheil, Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Roy Harris, and Howard Hanson.

Composers of fine art music who have appeared after 1950, however, have never rivaled in stature their counterparts of the first half of the century. Elliot Carter and Milton Babbitt did not become household names. Even less known have been the names of recent Pulitzer Prize winners. We seem to be experiencing a drought of musical greatness, a drought which has now lasted two generations or more.

It will likely be surprising to those who are not professional musicians that the above composers, whether from the first or second half of the century, all relate to one of two parent schools of modern musical composition: the Parisian and the Viennese. The modern Parisian school grew out of the impressionism pioneered by Claude Debussy in the late nineteenth century, and the Viennese out of late German Romanticism pioneered by Wagner. Some composers who were not French by nationality owed a great deal to Paris in spirit—especially Stravinsky. The Spanish and American schools were trained in Paris, and the English, Italians, and Russians also owed much to French music.

The French school was capable of many moods and forms—naïve, cheerful, and humorous—and it did not abandon either melody or tonality. The Viennese style, on the other hand, proved restricted in terms of emotional expression and difficult for the creation of form. It abandoned tonality (being called “atonal”) and developed serialism (the twelve-tone system of Schoenberg) to deal with form and unity.

An extended explanation of atonality would be difficult for a reader who is not a musician. Put simply, atonality refers to music that lacks a sense of key, of musical centering, of a place to return to. Atonality can occur throughout a piece of music or only in sections of the music. It creates a sense of disorientation and the perception that the music is nearly formless. To draw an analogy to painting, atonality in music is like abstractionism in art. The first reaction of many encountering it is that an atonal composition is “not music.”

Although the Viennese atonal school now seems inferior to the Parisian, in its time it appeared to be the cutting edge in music. It had laid intellectual claim to being “new” and “original”—and therefore, “creative” (much the way cubism and abstraction in art did). As such, the atonal style was adopted and developed by radical European philosophers of art who sought novelty above all else. Even though the influence of Paris was widespread, creative, and popular, it was the Viennese school that, for the later twentieth century—and especially in America—became the heart of the avant-garde. It was atonality that led to almost everything of prominence, however unpopular with audiences, after 1945. The atonal developments of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern became the inspiration for a school in musical composition that still claims descendents to the present day. Every composer who uses atonal style today is directly indebted to the Viennese school, and this includes all avant-garde styles after the Second World War except minimalism. Elliot Carter, Milton Babbitt, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Dallapiccola, John Cage, and George Crumb are all in some way Viennese musical descendents.