The Skandalkonzert ("scandal concert") was a concert conducted by Arnold Schoenberg, held on 31 March 1913. The concert was held by the Vienna Concert Society in the Great Hall of the Musikverein in Vienna. The concert consisted of music by composers of the Second Viennese School.

During the concert, the audience, shocked by the expressionism and experimentalism of the music, began rioting, and the concert ended prematurely. Amid the unrest, concert organizer Erhard Buschbeck was said to have slapped a concertgoer in the face; this would eventually lead to a lawsuit against Buschbeck. The event also led to an alternate name for the Skandalkonzert: Watschenkonzert, from the Austrian German for "slap concert". Operetta composer Oscar Straus, a witness to the alleged assault, testified that the slap had been the most harmonious sound of the evening.



Modernism is both a philosophical movement and an arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new forms of art, philosophy, and social organization which reflected the newly emerging industrial world, including features such as urbanization, new technologies, and war. Artists attempted to depart from traditional forms of art, which they considered outdated or obsolete. The poet Ezra Pound's 1934 injunction to "Make it New" was the touchstone of the movement's approach.

Modernist innovations included abstract art, the stream-of-consciousness novel, montage cinema, atonal and twelve-tone music, and divisionist painting. Modernism explicitly rejected the ideology of realism and made use of the works of the past by the employment of reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision and parody. Modernism also rejected the certainty of Enlightenment thinking, and many modernists also rejected religious belief. A notable characteristic of modernism is self-consciousness concerning artistic and social traditions, which often led to experimentation with form, along with the use of techniques that drew attention to the processes and materials used in creating works of art.While some scholars see modernism continuing into the 21st century, others see it evolving into late modernism or high modernism. Postmodernism is a departure from modernism and rejects its basic assumptions.