Any understanding of developments in twentieth-century music must inescapably begin with an awareness of the immediate nineteenth-century background. With Wagner and the other late German Romantics, certain musical tendencies had been developed to a point not previously reached.
The vocabulary of tonal-functional harmony had been extended, by the use of extreme chromaticism, well into regions of ambiguity.
Broadly coloristic techniques in the handling of orchestral masses had brought about the near-abandonment of rhythmic motion and motoric pulse, as well as the clearer textures of earlier years.