Kelvin H. F. Lee

The idea of being modern is often intertwined with the tenet of progress, whether understood through a Hegelian conception of history or a Darwinist view of sociocultural evolution. In a similar vein, traditional accounts of early musical modernism frequently associate modernity with the ‘emancipation of dissonance’, conceiving the departure from tonality as a historical or cultural necessity for progress. As Jason Yust (2024) points out, such a teleological narrative has its roots in François-Joseph Fétis’s Histoire Générale de la musique (1869), where tonality was presented as the conceptual framework for mapping diverse musical traditions of the world through an evolutionary lens. Within this historical paradigm, the development of music was naturally deemed to have peaked in the nineteenth century with European tonal music, and the logical next step would be to move beyond the tonal system. The notion of modernity, therefore, has customarily been linked to the use of dodecaphony or other non-tonal pitch-organising principles in the early twentieth century, as exemplified by Arnold Schoenberg’s Suite für Klavier, op. 25 (1921–23) and Olivier Messiaen’s La Nativité du Seigneur (1935). Listeners accustomed to their modernist sounds might then find the tonal idiom in the following piano work—Sonatine (1940) by Otaka Hisatada 尾高尚忠 (1911–51)—anachronistic by comparison […]