I Know He Doesn't Know Stravinsky's Music But He Knows You're Not Supposed To Diss Him Or "Modernism" - Stupid Mail

 Ja, wer tommerlt denn da?
Das ist ja der kleine Modernsky!
Hat sich ein Bubizopf schneiden lassen;
sieht ganz gut aus!
Wie echt falsches Haar!
Wie eine Perücke!
der
kleine Modernsky vorstellt>, ganz der Papa Bach!

Hey, who's drumming there?  
That's little Modernsky! 
He's got a bubble hair cut, 
looks pretty good! 
Like real false hair! '
Like a peruke! 
(Just as little Modernsky imagines him), 
quite the Papa Bach!

Arnold Schoenberg: Drei Saterien  1925/26 : 2 Vielseitigkeit (Versatility)

In the context of music at the time, clearly referencing a Russian (Modernsky) there was no one Schoenberg could have been making fun of but Stravinsky and, as Eduard Steurmann noted, Stravinsky knew that he was Schoenberg's target. It took "little Modernsky" more than three decades and a world war to get over the pinch and give up the neo-classicism which was an explicit feature of fascist and Nazi ideology as well as that of so many a modernist. 

"Modernism" was always a category that ill fitted what would be called "classical" music in the 20th century and I don't think it's more than a ill conceived categorization that even many of the composers, writers, painters, etc took on as a superfluous ideological identity.   The impulses that led to what would be called "the liberation of dissonance" went from that incredible innovator, Debussy to all kinds of directions, some of it, indeed, took the misdirection into self-conscious neo-classicism, I think a lot of the composers were afraid of what they were participating in and sought to find order in a largely imaginary past.  The commentaries that precede the score of  the Three Satires,* the one on this movement, notes the falsity of that "progress" was really a retreat into a phony, imaginary past. 
 

Yet in himself he remained as sensitive as ever; “ I wrote [the Saitres] when I was very much angered by attacks of some of my younger contemporaries at this time and I wanted to give them a warning that it is not good to attack me,” he explained in a letter to the American composer Amadeo de Filippi. His words were aimed at four groups he wished to target, as he writes in the foreword of the piece; those “who seek their personal salvation in the middle of the [compositional] road,” those who are oriented to the past, who look backwards instead of forwards,” the “folklorists” and lastly, “all the ‘…ists’ ** in whom I can only see mannerists.”

The discussion of what Schoenberg meant in the lyrics he wrote, in the explanation in his published introduction to the score, in the harmonic and formal structure of the music proves that the "modernism" (of which, Schoenberg was considered the ultra-modern of the ultra-modern of that decade) was based in harmonic and other structures of music, even the self conscious "neo-classicists" Stravinsky and his imitators, Karl Hindemith and his students (who almost to a person couldn't escape being his imitators) and others couldn't help but break out of the restrictions of neo-classicism, the "classical" in music being tied to the specific tonic-dominant harmonic pattern which by then was more a specimen pinned to a card and labeled than something you could center a composing career around.  

The vitality in Stravinsky's music came from its adoption of rhythms he heard in jazz and those he had gotten from Russian and Eastern European folk and popular music, raising something kind of like classical structures on that foundation.  I think it's the most self-consciously neo-classical pieces that tend to be the less successful ones.  Certainly, ironically, it's the most floridly romantic of the pieces that get played the most, along with the Symphony of Psalms.

* I don't mind translating the lyrics but the micro essays of Schoenberg aren't things I'm going to try to translate. If I find them translated I'll crib that translation later.

**  I'm quite sure that eventually would have included the "serialists."  Though many of the "ist" composers produced good works, occasionally great ones, the various "isms" that they adopted as a pseudo-intellectual platform contributed little good to those and not infrequently hampered them.  I think in the case of Hindemith and some others, their ideology made their inspiration less effective.  I do think that even for all of his inspiration, many of the monuments of neo-classicism that he produced were some of his least effective pieces.  There's a reason that he's still best known for his earliest works, the ones before he adopted the pose of classicism in the same period he was flapping his lips in disdain of democracy and adoration of Mussolini.    In music any self-consciously adopted "ism" is stupid, it's seeking intellectual status either before the creation of work that would justify that status or it's a futile attempt to hitch your wagon to some star who can carry that off better.