How the music of 1914 failed to predict the future horror BBC Radio 3 is getting in early with its salute to the centenary of the beginning of the First World War. For the whole of this week, much of the schedule has been pulled under the umbrella title of "On the Brink." Each week-day the focus has been on music and culture in a different European city, in the year 1914. The series has visited Vienna, Paris, Berlin, St Petersburg and London. The theme hasn't dominated every minute of the output; some strands have featured only be two or three pieces from 1914 out of an hour or two. But these glimpses have been bolstered by intelligent comment from specialist guests, and some programmes have been given over entirely to music from the year (give or take a digit or two), such as the concert of French piano music and song on Tuesday, and the fascinating debate on Robert Musil's great novel set in war-time Vienna, The Man Without Qualities. The network certainly chose a great title. It suggests that culture and music everywhere was dancing or edging towards the abyss, looking down either with horror or anticipation at the coming catastrophe. It's true that here and there you find evidence of a sixth sense in some artists, as if they knew what lay round the corner, and half wanted it. There was much talk of the purifying fire of battle, on both sides. "I hate this oily stinking peace," said the poet Georg Heym in 1913. If only something would happen. However I've been exploring the music in the series over the last four days, and I reckon I've only heard one piece expressing a real yearning for apocalypse. That's Scriabin's Vers la Flamme, heard today in a programme focused on St. Petersburg. Some of the music has looked forward in a different way. Tom Service's series of Modernist Moments has seized on the pieces that stand on a different sort of brink, the brink of modernism. Pieces like Webern's little miniatures for cello and piano and Stravinsky's Three Japanese Lyrics point are like arrows fired into the future. It's hard to associate them with any year, let alone the late Edwardian opulence of 1914. But how representative are these pieces of the era? Not really, judging by the music I've heard in the series. Much of it looks back rather than forward, such as the Englebert Humperdinck overture that launched the Berlin day (and what a surprise to discover that the composer of Hansel & Gretel was still alive in 1914). But a lot of the music doesn't look either forward or back. It's perfectly happy in its own skin, enjoying the experience of being alive in 1914. This isn't surprising, as it was an exciting time. The symbols of modernity that became socially widespread after the war had already been invented, such as the motor-car, the phonograph, and the radio. For most people, this was the "brink" the world stood on, not the commotions down in the Balkans stirred up by a few Serbian nationalist hotheads. We've had glimpses of this other face of 1914, such as Paul Lincke's jolly musical-hall song Berliner Luft. It's good that Radio 3 has included these, even though they contradict its own snappy title. They're just as symptomatic of the era, and they tend to be blotted out of the story by the prestige of those modernist masterpieces, which really do feel like a step into the unknown. Music on the Brink can be heard for one week after broadcast on the BBC iPlayer.