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Where to go after Romanticism?
Perhaps it was inevitable, after decades of pushing at all limits to see what was musically acceptable, that the Romantic era would leave later composers with the question of what to explore or challenge next. Perhaps because there was no clear answer to this question (or several possible answers), many things were happening in music by the end of the Romantic era.
The period that includes the final decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth is sometimes called the post-Romantic era. This is the period when many composers, such as Jean Sibelius, Bela Bartok, and Ralph Vaughan-Williams, concentrated on the traditions of their own countries, producing strongly nationalistic music. Others, such as Mahler and Strauss, were taking Romantic musical techniques to their utmost reasonable limits. In France, Debussy and Ravel were composing pieces that that some listeners felt were the musical equivalent of impressionistic paintings. Impressionism and some other -isms such as Stravinsky's primitivism still had some basis in tonality; but others, such as serialism, rejected tonality and the Classical-Romantic tradition completely, believing that it had produced all that it could. In the early twentieth century, these Modernists eventually came to dominate the art music tradition. Though the sounds and ideals of Romanticism continued to inspire some composers, the Romantic period was essentially over by the beginning of the twentieth century.
Historical Background
Music doesn't happen in a vacuum. It is affected by other things that are going on in society; ideas, attitudes, discoveries, inventions, and historical events may affect the music of the times.
For example, the "Industrial Revolution" was gaining steam throughout the nineteenth century. This had a very practical effect on music: there were major improvements in the mechanical valves and keys that most woodwinds and...