Composing music in the early twentieth century cannot have been easy. Aspiring composers active in the decades straddling 1900 faced the accumulated weight of tradition, which created a daunting mental barrier—a “very strong pincers” in Stravinsky's words. In the experimentation of that period we hear composers searching out distinctive voices against reverberating masterworks. Wagner, Brahms, Bruckner, and Mahler had cultivated to full ripeness the fruits of a century's development. What else could be said? Experiments in musical Modernism took several directions in pioneering works of composers such as Stravinsky, Bartók, Debussy, and Schoenberg. To seasoned listeners and critics of the day, some experiments surely seemed like novelty for its own sake, a way of staking a claim of originality in uncharted musical territories. Chronicled reactions of puzzlement, dismay, and dismissal suggest that critics and the public alike were often unable to understand the new voices.

Alongside innovative trails blazed by Modernists, we find works of Traditionalists whose music, while original in a different way, committed openly to tonality. Pfitzner, Reger, and Strauss come to mind. Unlike the alternatives to common-practice tonality pioneered by the Moderns (folk modality, octatonicism and other non-Western or invented scales, pitch centricity, atonality, twelve-tone tonality), Traditionalists remained on the developmental path of tonality that traversed the nineteenth century and continued into the twentieth. August Halm was one such Traditionalist. Not unlike his contemporaries, but with certain crucial differences in aesthetic outlook, he confronted tradition and attempted to build on and extend it in the search, not so much for a unique compositional voice but rather for a healthier musical art, one founded on timeless aesthetic values rather than on daring or novel experiments.