Neue Musik (English new music, French nouvelle musique) is the collective term for a wealth of different currents in composed Western art music from around 1910 to the present. Its focus is on compositions of 20th century music. It is characterised in particular by – sometimes radical – expansions of tonal, harmonic, melodic and rhythmic means and forms. It is characterised by the search for new sounds, new forms or new combinations of old styles, which is partly a continuation of existing traditions, partly a deliberate break with tradition and appears either as progress or as renewal (neo- or post-styles).
Roughly speaking, Neue Musik can be divided into the period from around 1910 to the Second World War – often referred to as "modernism" – and the reorientation after the Second World War, which is perceived as "radical" – usually apostrophised as avant-garde – up to the present. The latter period is sometimes subdivided into the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, whereby the last three decades have not yet been further differentiated (the summary term "postmodernism" has not become established).
In order to describe contemporary music in a narrower sense, the term Zeitgenössische Musik (English contemporary music, French musique contemporaine) is used without referring to a fixed periodisation. The term "Neue Musik" was coined by the music journalist Paul Bekker in 1919.
Representatives of Neue Musik are sometimes called neutoners.
Compositional means and styles
The most important step in the reorientation of musical language was taken in the field of harmony, namely the gradual abandonment of tonality – towards free atonality and finally towards twelve-tone technique. Towards the end of the 19th century, the tendency to use increasingly complex chord formations led to harmonic areas that could no longer be clearly explained by the underlying major-minor tonality – a process that had already begun with Wagner and Liszt. From this, Arnold Schönberg and his students Alban Berg and Anton Webern drew the most systematic consequence, which culminated in the formulation (1924) of the method of "composition with twelve tones related only to one another" (dodecaphony). These atonal rules of composition provide composers with a toolkit that helps to avoid the principles of tonality. The designation as "Second Viennese School" in analogy to the "First Viennese School" (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven) already betrays the special position that this group of composers has as a mediating authority.
The principle of using all twelve tones of the tempered scale equally, without favouring individual tones, seems to have occupied various composers in the first two decades of the 20th century, who simultaneously, but independently of Schönberg, advanced to similarly bold results. Among these experimenters, in whose works twelve-tone and serial approaches can be discerned, is first of all Josef Matthias Hauer, who publicly argued with Schönberg about the "copyright" to twelve-tone music. Also to be mentioned is Alexander Scriabin, whose atonal sound-centre technique, based on quartal layering, subsequently paved the way for remarkable experiments by a whole generation of young Russian composers. The significance of this generation of composers for New Music, which emerged in the climate of the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, could only penetrate into consciousness in the second half of the century, as they were already systematically eliminated by the Stalinist dictatorship in the late 1920s. Here, Nikolai Roslavets, Arthur Lourié, Alexander Mossolov and Ivan Wyschnegradsky should be mentioned as representatives.