The Community of the Ultramoderns

Well into the twentieth century, American music and the arts were influenced by nostalgia for the past and communalism based on self-organization. The ultramodern composers of the 1920s rejected nostalgia in favor of self-organization. It was Edgard Varèse, a French immigrant who had arrived in America in 1915 and formed the International Composers' Guild, who proposed the idea for a new type of musical organization and played a central role in the acceptance of ultramodern music in the 1920s. Other musicians played key roles in the modernist movement of the 1920s and were gravitating to New York, particularly Carl Ruggles, Charles Seeger, and Henry Cowell. In the 1920s, musical modernism gave rise to a relatively complete subculture in which composers founded their own organizations to promote their own music. A problem of ultramodernism from the very first concerts of Ornstein was the audience, although it was not sought by every ultramodern composer.