10 - Musical motives in Modernism

Summary

A scientific event removed one of the most important obstacles from my path. This was the further division of the atom. The collapse of the atom was equated, in my soul, with the collapse of the whole world. Suddenly,the stoutest walls crumbled. Everything became uncertain, precarious and insubstantial. I would not have been surprised had a stone dissolved into thin air before my eyes and become invisible.

There is nothing more enabling or more disabling than total lack of support: you fall or you fly. The artists of the beginning of the twentieth century found themselves in a state of uncomfortable freedom; and if no one would legislate for them, they had to make their own laws. The painter Vassili Kandinsky, one of the founders of abstract painting (and the author of the epigraph above), was fond of citing the Dostoevskian phrase "Everything is permitted" - he felt that, when the discipline of the representable form has vanished, painters have to seek discipline elsewhere. Again and again Kandinsky fretted about a lack of grammar in the art of painting, and envied the art of music for having a set of reliable procedures, "its own grammar, which, like all living things, changes."