the music of our time participates substantially in the life of
today. It is a reflection of the aspirations of modern life and the
necessities imposed on it. If only on these grounds, it should be
presented as a contribution to the general history of our time.

By "modern music" we mean the music written after Debussy
and Ravel in France; after Strauss, Reger, and Mahler in Ger-
many and Austria; after the Five and Scriabin in Russia; after
verismo in Italy. In short, modern music begins around 1910.
Still, it is impossible to place a strict boundary between this and
the previous period, for although the evolution has sometimes
spurted ahead, it has proceeded smoothly for the most part. A
new form sometimes has its roots far back in earlier times.

Earlier periods formed great conceptual wholes, and carry the
names impressionist, romantic, classic, and baroque. Modern mu-
sic differs in that it has no one single trend launched in a given
direction. Rather, it is the meeting ground of numerous and di-
vergent trends. Far from showing a unified front, the contem-
porary period is distinguishable from earlier periods by its great
diversity-I would say by a sort of multipolarity, a term which
applies equally to general contemporary history. Instead of
drawing up a synthesis of the music we are examining, we will
therefore have to follow each of the different trends or diverse
patterns which have led to the creation of important works and
had lasting influence on and brought new and valid elements
to music.

Music is a language. But a language is formed and transformed
by the weight of interior forces--the conception of life, the nature
of feeling and intelligence, and the need for communication.

It would be wrong to treat the history of music in terms of
pure philology, because in order to understand the structure of a
language we must first of all know to what concepts it corre-
sponds. And yet, despite the diversity of its concepts, contem-
porary music contributes to the end, or at least the end of the
exclusive reign, of the principle of tonality. The reign of classic
tonal harmony, as well as the dominion of the bar-measure sys-
tem over rhythm, is finished.

Johann Sebastian Bach, who has been called the Louis XIV
of tonality, followed his inclination to simplify and purify music
by making the final break from antique and ecclesiastic modes

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