The Post-Modern Ear

[David Morris]

http://axess.se/magasin/english.aspx?article=713

A concert-goer in the early 1930s would have been faced with two
completely different musics – one (Vaughan Williams, Holst, Sibelius,
Walton, Strauss, Busoni) remaining within the bounds of the tonal
language, the other (Schoenberg and his school) consciously departing
from the old language, and often striking a deliberately defiant pose
towards it. Somewhere in between those two musics hovered the great
eclectic geniuses, Stravinsky, Bartók and Prokoviev. And meanwhile the
polemics abounded, some dismissing the tonal idiom as reactionary and
exhausted, some attacking the modernists as nonsensical and
deliberately insulting to the good bourgeois audiences who paid for
their self-indulgence.