20th century classical music
Encyclopedia
20th century classical music was without a dominant style and highly diverse.
in style. Composers such as Gustav Mahler
and Jean Sibelius
were pushing the bounds of Post-Romantic
Symphonic writing
. At the same time, the Impressionist
movement, spearheaded by Claude Debussy
, was being developed in France. The term was actually loathed by Debussy: "I am trying to do 'something different—in a way realities—what the imbeciles call 'impressionism' is a term which is as poorly used as possible, particularly by art critics" (Politoske 1988, 419)—and Maurice Ravel
's music, also often labelled with this term, explores music in many styles not always related to it (see the discussion on Neoclassicism, below).
Many composers reacted to the Post-Romantic and Impressionist styles and moved in quite different directions. In Vienna
, Arnold Schoenberg
developed atonality
, out of the expressionism that arose in the early part of the 20th century. He later developed the twelve-tone technique
which was developed further by his disciples Alban Berg
and Anton Webern
; later composers (including Luciano Berio
and Pierre Boulez
) developed it further still (Ross 2008, 194–96 and 363–64). Stravinsky (in his last works) explored twelve-tone technique, too, as did many other composers; indeed, even Scott Bradley
used the technique in his scores for the Tom and Jerry
cartoons (Ross 2008, 296).
After the First World War, many composers started returning to previous centuries for their inspiration and wrote works that draw elements (form, harmony, melody, structure) from this music. This type of music thus became labelled neoclassicism
. Igor Stravinsky
(Pulcinella
and Symphony of Psalms
), Sergei Prokofiev
(Classical Symphony
), Ravel (Le Tombeau de Couperin
) and Hindemith (Mathis der Maler
) all produced neoclassical works.
Italian composers such as Francesco Balilla Pratella
and Luigi Russolo
developed musical Futurism. This style often tried to recreate everyday sounds and place them in a "Futurist" context. The "Machine Music" of George Antheil
(starting with his Second Sonata, "The Airplane") and Alexander Mosolov
(most notoriously his Iron Foundry
) developed out of this. The process of extending musical vocabulary by exploring all available tones was pushed further by the use of Microtones
in works by Charles Ives
, Julián Carrillo
, Alois Hába
, John Foulds
, Ivan Wyschnegradsky, and Mildred Couper
among many others. Microtones are those intervals that are smaller that a semitone
; human voices and unfretted strings can easily produce them by going in between the "normal" notes, but other instruments will have more difficulty—the piano and organ have no way of producing them at all, aside from retuning and/or major reconstruction.
In the 1940s and 50s composers, notably Pierre Schaeffer
, started to explore the application of technology to music in musique concrète
. (Dack 2002) The term Electroacoustic music
was later coined to include all forms of music involving magnetic tape
, computers
, synthesizer
s, multimedia
, and other electronic devices and techniques. Live electronic music
uses live electronic sounds within a performance (as opposed to preprocessed sounds that are overdubbed during a performance), Cage's Cartridge Music being an early example. Spectral music
(Gerard Grisey
and Tristan Murail
) is a further development of electroacoustic music that uses analyses of sound spectra to create music (Dufourt 1981; Dufourt 1991). Cage, Berio, Boulez, Milton Babbitt
, Luigi Nono
and Edgard Varèse
all wrote Electroacoustic music, often promoted in "happening
s".
From the early 1950s onwards, Cage introduced elements of chance into his music. This has resulted in various musical techniques such as indeterminacy
, aleatoric music
, stochastic music, intuitive music
, and free improvisation
. Process music
(Karlheinz Stockhausen
Prozession, Aus den sieben Tagen
; and Steve Reich
Piano Phase, Clapping Music) explores a particular process which is essentially laid bare in the work. The term Experimental music
seems to have been coined by Cage who was interested in writing complete works that performed an unpredictable action (Mauceri 1997, 197), according to the definition "an experimental action is one the outcome of which is not foreseen" (Cage 1961, 39). The term is also used to describe music within specific genres that pushes against their boundaries or definitions, or else whose approach is a hybrid of disparate styles, or incorporates unorthodox, new, distinctly unique ingredients.
Important cultural trends often informed music of this period, romantic, modernist, neoclassical, postmodernist or otherwise. Igor Stravinsky
and Sergei Prokofiev
were particularly drawn to primitivism
in their early careers, as explored in works such as The Rite of Spring
and Chout
. Other Russians, notably Dmitri Shostakovich
, reflected the social impact of communism
and subsequently had to work within the strictures of socialist realism
in their music (McBurney 2004). Other composers, such as Benjamin Britten
(War Requiem
), explored political themes in their works, albeit entirely at their own volition (Evans 1979, 450). Nationalism was also an important means of expression in the early part of the century. The culture of the United States
of America, especially, began informing an American vernacular style of classical music, notably in the works of Charles Ives
, John Alden Carpenter
, and (later) George Gershwin
. Folk music
(Vaughan Williams' Variants on Dives and Lazarus, Gustav Holst
's A Somerset Rhapsody) and Jazz
(Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein
, Darius Milhaud
's La création du monde
) were also influential.
In the latter quarter of the century, eclecticism
and polystylism
became important. These, as well as minimalism, New Complexity
and New Simplicity
, are more fully explored in their respective articles. The term postmodern music
is often applied to music that "reacts" to Modernism, though it is not always clear what the "reaction" precisely is.
), the Romantic
style was starting to break apart, moving along various parallel courses, such as Impressionism
and Post-romanticism
. In the 20th century, the different styles that emerged from the music of the previous century influenced composers to follow new trends, sometimes as a reaction to that music, sometimes as an extension of it, and both trends co-existed well into the 20th century. The former trends, such as Expressionism
are discussed later. In the early part of the 20th century, many composers wrote music which was an extension of 19th-century Romantic music, and traditional instrumental groupings such as the orchestra
and string quartet
remained the most typical. Traditional forms such as the symphony
and concerto
remained in use. Gustav Mahler
and Jean Sibelius
are examples of composers who took the traditional symphonic forms and reworked them. (See Romantic Music
) Some writers hold that the Schoenberg's work is squarely within the late-Romantic tradition of Wagner and Brahms (Neighbour 2001, 582) and, more generally, that "the composer who most directly and completely connects late Wagner and the 20th century is Arnold Schoenberg" (Salzman 1988, 10).
, against the emotional exuberance and epic themes of German Romanticism exemplified by Wagner
. In Debussy's view, art was a sensuous experience, rather than an intellectual or ethical one. He urged his countrymen to rediscover the French masters of the 18th century, for whom music was meant to charm, to entertain, and to serve as a "fantasy of the senses" (Machlis 1979, 86–87). Other composers associated with impressionism include Maurice Ravel
, Albert Roussel
, Isaac Albéniz
, Paul Dukas
, Manuel de Falla
, Charles Martin Loeffler
, Charles Griffes
, Frederick Delius
, Ottorino Respighi
, and Karol Szymanowski
(Machlis 1979, 115–18). Many French composers continued impressionism's language through the 1920s and later, including Albert Roussel
, Charles Koechlin
, André Caplet
, and, later, Olivier Messiaen
. Composers from non-Western cultures, such as Tōru Takemitsu
, and jazz musicians such as Duke Ellington
, Gil Evans
, Art Tatum
, and Cecil Taylor
, also have been strongly influenced by the impressionist musical language (Pasler 2001).
and politics
) and was often accompanied by a complete break with the past and, most particularly, a rejection of the common practice
. Surrealism
was an important early manifestation of this. Modernism covers most of the movements that are described below. Postmodernism was the reaction to Modernism.
integrated American and European traditions as well as vernacular and church styles, while using innovative techniques in his rhythm, harmony, and form (Burkholder 2001). His technique included the use of polytonality
, polyrhythm
, tone cluster
s, aleatoric
elements, and quarter tone
s. Edgard Varèse
wrote highly dissonant pieces that utilized unusual sonorities and futuristic, scientific sounding names. He pioneered the use of new instruments and electronic resources
(see below).
; it was quickly embraced by the Russian avant garde. In 1913, the painter Luigi Russolo
published a manifesto, L'arte dei rumori (The Art of Noises), calling for the incorporation of noises of every kind into music (Russolo 1913). In addition to Russolo, composers directly associated with this movement include the Italians Silvio Mix, Nuccio Fiorda, Franco Casavola
, and Pannigi (whose 1922 Ballo meccanico included two motorcycles), and the Russians Artur Lourié, Mikhail Matyushin
, and Nikolai Roslavets
. Though few of the futurist works of these composers are performed today, the influence of futurism on the later development of 20th-century music was enormous. Sergei Prokofiev
, Maurice Ravel
, Igor Stravinsky
, Arthur Honegger
, George Antheil
, Leo Ornstein
, and Edgard Varèse are among the notable composers in the first half of the century who were influenced by futurism. Characteristic features of later 20th-century music with origins in futurism include the prepared piano
, integral serialism
, extended vocal techniques, graphic notation, improvisation
, and minimalism
(Dennis & Powell 2001).
, the Klavierstück, op. 11, no. 3, and the first and last of his Five Orchestral Pieces, op. 16. Certain works from this same period by his pupils Alban Berg and Anton Webern are also usually included. Although this music sets out from Wagner’s chromatic harmony (especially Kundry’s music in Parsifal
), it tends to avoid cadence, repetition, sequence, balanced phrases, and any reference to traditional forms or procedures, for which reason it came to be associated with a rejection of tradition. Other composers active in approximately this period such as Gustav Mahler
, Alexander Scriabin
, Josef Matthias Hauer
, Igor Stravinsky
, Karol Szymanowski
, Béla Bartók
, Paul Hindemith
, Charles Ives
, and Ernst Krenek
also exhibit expressionist traits, while important stage works of the 1920s by Kurt Weill
, Hindemith, and Krenek retain expressionistic textual and visual aspects even though their musical language no longer reflects expressionism's aesthetic principles. By the late 1920s, though many composers continued to write in a vaguely expressionist manner, it was being supplanted by the more impersonal style of the German Neue Sachlichkeit
and neoclassicism
. Because expressionism, like any movement that had been stigmatized by the Nazis, gained a sympathetic reconsideration following World War II, expressionist music resurfaced in works by composers such as Hans Werner Henze
, Pierre Boulez
, Peter Maxwell Davies
, Wolfgang Rihm
, and Bernd Alois Zimmermann
(Fanning 2001).
is one of the most significant figures in 20th-century music. While starting off as a Late Romantic influenced by Wagner (Transfigured Night), he moved to Atonality (Drei Klavierstücke
and Pierrot Lunaire
). In 1921, after several years of research, he developed the twelve-tone technique
of composition, which he first described privately to his associates in 1923 (Schoenberg 1975, 213) (Variations for Orchestra, Op. 31). He later returned to a more tonal style (Kammersymphonie no. 2
). He taught Anton Webern
and Alban Berg
and these three composers are often referred to as the principle members of the Second Viennese School
(Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven—and sometimes Schubert—being regarded as the First Viennese School
in this context). Webern wrote works using a rigorous 12-tone method and influenced the development of total serialism. Berg often combined the 12-tone method method with Late Romanticism and Post-romanticism
(Violin Concerto
, which quotes a Bach Choral and uses Classical form). He wrote two major operas (Wozzeck
and Lulu
).
is applied to several movements in the arts during the 18th and 19th centuries, but the term has become the common name for music that revives earlier practices and techniques. Famous examples include Prokofiev's
Classical Symphony
and Stravinsky's
Pulcinella
. Paul Hindemith
(Mathis de Maler) and Darius Milhaud
also used this style. Maurice Ravel
's Le Tombeau de Couperin
is often seen as neobaroque (an architectural term), though the distinction between the terms is not always made.
means of producing sound.
After the Second World War, magnetic tape
became available for the creation of music by recording sounds and then manipulating them in some way. When the source material was acoustical sounds from the everyday world, the term musique concrète
was used; when the sounds were produced by electronic generators, it was designated electronic music
. After the 1950s, the term "electronic music" came to be used for both types. Sometimes such electronic music was combined with more conventional instruments, Stockhausen's Hymnen
, Edgard Varèse
's Déserts
, and Mario Davidovsky
's series of Synchronisms are three examples.
idiom with classical compositional styles, notably Leonard Bernstein
, Aaron Copland
, George Gershwin
, Darius Milhaud
, and Maurice Ravel
.
John Cage
is a prominent figure in 20th-century music, claimed with some justice both for modernism and postmodernism because the complex intersections between modernism and postmodernism are not reducible to simple schemata (Williams 2002, 241). His influence steadily grew during his lifetime. His best-known work is 4′33″ in which any instrumentalist (or combination of instrumentalists) is instructed not to play for the duration of the work. He often uses elements of chance: Imaginary Landscape No. 4
for 12 radio receivers, and Music of Changes
for piano. Sonatas and Interludes
(1946–48) is composed for a prepared piano
: a normal piano whose timbre is dramatically altered by carefully placing various objects inside the piano in contact with the strings (a concept inspired by some of Henry Cowell
's 'String Piano' techniques).
Most of the styles and movements that follow can be classified as "postmodern".
, Philip Glass
, Terry Riley
, Steve Reich
, and John Adams began to explore what is now called minimalism
, in which the work is stripped down to its most fundamental features; the music often features repetition and iteration. An early example is Terry Riley's In C
(1964), an aleatoric work in which short phrases are chosen by the musicians from a set list and played an arbitrary number of times, while the note C is repeated in eighth notes (quavers) behind them. Steve Reich's works Piano Phase
(1967, for two pianos), and Drumming
(1970–71, for percussion, female voices and piccolo) employ the technique called phasing
in which a phrase played by one player maintaining a constant pace is played simultaneously by another but at a slightly quicker pace. This causes the players to go "out of phase" with each other and the performance may continue until they come back in phase. Philip Glass's 1 + 1 (1968) employs the additive process in which short phrases are slowly expanded. La Monte Young's Compositions 1960 employes very long tones, exceptionally high volumes and extra-musical techniques such as "draw a straight line and follow it" or "build a fire". Michael Nyman
argues that minimalism was a reaction to and made possible by both serialism and indeterminism (Nyman 1999, 139). (See also experimental music
)
in the early part of the century, and later with the inventions of magnetic tape
, the cassette
, DAT
, and the compact disc
. In addition, broadcasting
technologies, such as radio
and television
have meant that the concert hall, opera house
, salon
, and domestic music-making are no longer the only means by which a performance can reach its audience.
and Gérard Grisey
, and the 'post-spectral' composers Kaija Saariaho
and Magnus Lindberg
.
Introduction
At the turn of the century, music was characteristically late RomanticRomantic music
Romantic music or music in the Romantic Period is a musicological and artistic term referring to a particular period, theory, compositional practice, and canon in Western music history, from 1810 to 1900....
in style. Composers such as Gustav Mahler
Gustav Mahler
Gustav Mahler was a late-Romantic Austrian composer and one of the leading conductors of his generation. He was born in the village of Kalischt, Bohemia, in what was then Austria-Hungary, now Kaliště in the Czech Republic...
and Jean Sibelius
Jean Sibelius
Jean Sibelius was a Finnish composer of the later Romantic period whose music played an important role in the formation of the Finnish national identity. His mastery of the orchestra has been described as "prodigious."...
were pushing the bounds of Post-Romantic
Post-romanticism
Post-romanticism or Postromanticism refers to a range of cultural products and attitudes emerging in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, after the period of Romanticism....
Symphonic writing
Symphony
A symphony is an extended musical composition in Western classical music, scored almost always for orchestra. A symphony usually contains at least one movement or episode composed according to the sonata principle...
. At the same time, the Impressionist
Impressionist music
Impressionism in music was a tendency in European classical music, mainly in France, which appeared in the late nineteenth century and continued into the middle of the twentieth century. Similarly to its precursor in the visual arts, musical impressionism focuses on a suggestion and an atmosphere...
movement, spearheaded by Claude Debussy
Claude Debussy
Claude-Achille Debussy was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures working within the field of impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions...
, was being developed in France. The term was actually loathed by Debussy: "I am trying to do 'something different—in a way realities—what the imbeciles call 'impressionism' is a term which is as poorly used as possible, particularly by art critics" (Politoske 1988, 419)—and Maurice Ravel
Maurice Ravel
Joseph-Maurice Ravel was a French composer known especially for his melodies, orchestral and instrumental textures and effects...
's music, also often labelled with this term, explores music in many styles not always related to it (see the discussion on Neoclassicism, below).
Many composers reacted to the Post-Romantic and Impressionist styles and moved in quite different directions. In Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
, Arnold Schoenberg
Arnold Schoenberg
Arnold Schoenberg was an Austrian composer, associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School...
developed atonality
Atonality
Atonality in its broadest sense describes music that lacks a tonal center, or key. Atonality in this sense usually describes compositions written from about 1908 to the present day where a hierarchy of pitches focusing on a single, central tone is not used, and the notes of the chromatic scale...
, out of the expressionism that arose in the early part of the 20th century. He later developed the twelve-tone technique
Twelve-tone technique
Twelve-tone technique is a method of musical composition devised by Arnold Schoenberg...
which was developed further by his disciples Alban Berg
Alban Berg
Alban Maria Johannes Berg was an Austrian composer. He was a member of the Second Viennese School with Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, and produced compositions that combined Mahlerian Romanticism with a personal adaptation of Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique.-Early life:Berg was born in...
and Anton Webern
Anton Webern
Anton Webern was an Austrian composer and conductor. He was a member of the Second Viennese School. As a student and significant follower of Arnold Schoenberg, he became one of the best-known exponents of the twelve-tone technique; in addition, his innovations regarding schematic organization of...
; later composers (including Luciano Berio
Luciano Berio
Luciano Berio, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI was an Italian composer. He is noted for his experimental work and also for his pioneering work in electronic music.-Biography:Berio was born at Oneglia Luciano Berio, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI (October 24, 1925 – May 27, 2003) was an Italian...
and Pierre Boulez
Pierre Boulez
Pierre Boulez is a French composer of contemporary classical music, a pianist, and a conductor.-Early years:Boulez was born in Montbrison, Loire, France. As a child he began piano lessons and demonstrated aptitude in both music and mathematics...
) developed it further still (Ross 2008, 194–96 and 363–64). Stravinsky (in his last works) explored twelve-tone technique, too, as did many other composers; indeed, even Scott Bradley
Scott Bradley
Scott Bradley was an American composer, pianist and conductor.Bradley is best remembered for scoring the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer theatrical cartoons, including those starring Tom and Jerry , Droopy , Barney Bear , and the many one-shot cartoons.Bradley was a...
used the technique in his scores for the Tom and Jerry
Tom and Jerry
Tom and Jerry are the cat and mouse cartoon characters that were evolved starting in 1939.Tom and Jerry also may refer to:Cartoon works featuring the cat and mouse so named:* The Tom and Jerry Show...
cartoons (Ross 2008, 296).
After the First World War, many composers started returning to previous centuries for their inspiration and wrote works that draw elements (form, harmony, melody, structure) from this music. This type of music thus became labelled neoclassicism
Neoclassicism (music)
Neoclassicism in music was a twentieth-century trend, particularly current in the period between the two World Wars, in which composers sought to return to aesthetic precepts associated with the broadly defined concept of "classicism", namely order, balance, clarity, economy, and emotional restraint...
. Igor Stravinsky
Igor Stravinsky
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky ; 6 April 1971) was a Russian, later naturalized French, and then naturalized American composer, pianist, and conductor....
(Pulcinella
Pulcinella
Pulcinella, ; often called Punch or Punchinello in English, Polichinelle in French, is a classical character that originated in the commedia dell'arte of the 17th century and became a stock character in Neapolitan puppetry....
and Symphony of Psalms
Symphony of Psalms
The Symphony of Psalms by Igor Stravinsky was written in 1930 and was commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. This piece is a three-movement choral symphony and was composed during Stravinsky's neoclassical period. The symphony derives...
), Sergei Prokofiev
Sergei Prokofiev
Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev was a Russian composer, pianist and conductor who mastered numerous musical genres and is regarded as one of the major composers of the 20th century...
(Classical Symphony
Symphony No. 1 (Prokofiev)
Sergei Prokofiev began work on his Symphony No. 1 in D major in 1916, but wrote most of it in 1917, finishing work on September 10. It is written in loose imitation of the style of Haydn , and is widely known as the Classical Symphony, a name given to it by the composer...
), Ravel (Le Tombeau de Couperin
Le Tombeau de Couperin
Le tombeau de Couperin is a suite for solo piano by Maurice Ravel, composed between 1914 and 1917, in six movements. Each movement is dedicated to the memory of friends of the composer who had died fighting in World War I...
) and Hindemith (Mathis der Maler
Mathis der Maler (symphony)
Symphony: Mathis der Maler is among the most famous orchestral works of German composer Paul Hindemith. The symphony is based on themes from Hindemith's opera Mathis der Maler, which concerns the painter Matthias Grünewald .Hindemith composed the symphony in 1934, before he had completed work on...
) all produced neoclassical works.
Italian composers such as Francesco Balilla Pratella
Francesco Balilla Pratella
Franceso Balilla Pratella was an Italian composer and musicologist.-Life and work:Pratella studied at the Pesaro Conservatory where he was a pupil of Pietro Mascagni....
and Luigi Russolo
Luigi Russolo
Luigi Russolo was an Italian Futurist painter and composer, and the author of the manifesto The Art of Noises . He is often regarded as one of the first noise music experimental composers with his performances of "noise concerts" in 1913-14 and then again after World War I, notably in Paris in 1921...
developed musical Futurism. This style often tried to recreate everyday sounds and place them in a "Futurist" context. The "Machine Music" of George Antheil
George Antheil
George Antheil was an American avant-garde composer, pianist, author and inventor. A self-described "Bad Boy of Music", his modernist compositions amazed and appalled listeners in Europe and the US during the 1920s with their cacophonous celebration of mechanical devices.Returning permanently to...
(starting with his Second Sonata, "The Airplane") and Alexander Mosolov
Alexander Mosolov
Alexander Vasilyevich MosolovMosolov's name is transliterated variously and inconsistently between sources. Alternative spellings of Alexander include Alexandr, Aleksandr, Aleksander, and Alexandre; variations on Mosolov include Mossolov and Mossolow...
(most notoriously his Iron Foundry
Iron Foundry
Factory: machine-music , Op. 19, commonly referred to as the Iron Foundry, is the most well-known work by Soviet composer Alexander Mosolov and a prime example of Soviet futurist music. It was composed between 1926 and 1927 as the first movement of the ballet suite...
) developed out of this. The process of extending musical vocabulary by exploring all available tones was pushed further by the use of Microtones
Microtonal music
Microtonal music is music using microtones—intervals of less than an equally spaced semitone. Microtonal music can also refer to music which uses intervals not found in the Western system of 12 equal intervals to the octave.-Terminology:...
in works by Charles Ives
Charles Ives
Charles Edward Ives was an American modernist composer. He is one of the first American composers of international renown, though Ives' music was largely ignored during his life, and many of his works went unperformed for many years. Over time, Ives came to be regarded as an "American Original"...
, Julián Carrillo
Julián Carrillo
Julián Carrillo Trujillo was a Mexican composer, conductor, violinist and music theorist, famous for developing a theory of microtonal music which he dubbed "The Thirteenth Sound" .-Biography:...
, Alois Hába
Alois Hába
Alois Hába was a Czech composer, musical theorist and teacher. He is primarily known for his microtonal compositions, especially using the quarter tone scale, though he used others such as sixth-tones and twelfth-tones....
, John Foulds
John Foulds
John Herbert Foulds was a British composer of classical music. Largely self-taught as a composer, he was one of the most remarkable and unjustly forgotten figures of the "British Musical Renaissance"....
, Ivan Wyschnegradsky, and Mildred Couper
Mildred Couper
Mildred Couper , prominent American composer and pianist, was one of the first musicians to experiment with quarter-tone music. She was based in Santa Barbara, California, but her music and influence were felt around the world...
among many others. Microtones are those intervals that are smaller that a semitone
Semitone
A semitone, also called a half step or a half tone, is the smallest musical interval commonly used in Western tonal music, and it is considered the most dissonant when sounded harmonically....
; human voices and unfretted strings can easily produce them by going in between the "normal" notes, but other instruments will have more difficulty—the piano and organ have no way of producing them at all, aside from retuning and/or major reconstruction.
In the 1940s and 50s composers, notably Pierre Schaeffer
Pierre Schaeffer
Pierre Henri Marie Schaeffer was a French composer, writer, broadcaster, engineer, musicologist and acoustician of the 20th century. His innovative work in both the sciences —particularly communications and acoustics— and the various arts of music, literature and radio presentation after the end...
, started to explore the application of technology to music in musique concrète
Musique concrète
Musique concrète is a form of electroacoustic music that utilises acousmatic sound as a compositional resource. The compositional material is not restricted to the inclusion of sounds derived from musical instruments or voices, nor to elements traditionally thought of as "musical"...
. (Dack 2002) The term Electroacoustic music
Electroacoustic music
Electroacoustic music originated in Western art music during its modern era following the incorporation of electric sound production into compositional practice. The initial developments in electroacoustic music composition during the mid-20th century are associated with the activities of composers...
was later coined to include all forms of music involving magnetic tape
Magnetic tape
Magnetic tape is a medium for magnetic recording, made of a thin magnetizable coating on a long, narrow strip of plastic. It was developed in Germany, based on magnetic wire recording. Devices that record and play back audio and video using magnetic tape are tape recorders and video tape recorders...
, computers
Computer music
Computer music is a term that was originally used within academia to describe a field of study relating to the applications of computing technology in music composition; particularly that stemming from the Western art music tradition...
, synthesizer
Synthesizer
A synthesizer is an electronic instrument capable of producing sounds by generating electrical signals of different frequencies. These electrical signals are played through a loudspeaker or set of headphones...
s, multimedia
Multimedia
Multimedia is media and content that uses a combination of different content forms. The term can be used as a noun or as an adjective describing a medium as having multiple content forms. The term is used in contrast to media which use only rudimentary computer display such as text-only, or...
, and other electronic devices and techniques. Live electronic music
Live electronic music
Live electronic music generally utilizes instrumental or electronic sounds but excludes those that have been prerecorded. The timbres of the various sounds may then be transformed extensively during performance using devices such as amplifiers, filters, ring modulators and other forms of circuitry...
uses live electronic sounds within a performance (as opposed to preprocessed sounds that are overdubbed during a performance), Cage's Cartridge Music being an early example. Spectral music
Spectral music
Spectral music is a musical composition practice where compositional decisions are often informed by the analysis of sound spectra. Computer-based sound spectrum analysis using tools like DFT, FFT, and spectrograms...
(Gerard Grisey
Gérard Grisey
Gérard Grisey was a French composer of contemporary music.-Biography:Gérard Grisey was born in Belfort, France on 17 June 1946. He studied at the Trossingen Conservatory in Germany from 1963 to 1965 before entering the Conservatoire de Paris...
and Tristan Murail
Tristan Murail
Tristan Murail is a French composer. His father, Gérard Murail, is a poet and his mother, Marie-Thérèse Barrois, a journalist. One of his brothers, Lorris Murail, and his younger sister Elvire Murail, aka Moka, also write, and his younger sister Marie-Aude Murail is a French children's writer...
) is a further development of electroacoustic music that uses analyses of sound spectra to create music (Dufourt 1981; Dufourt 1991). Cage, Berio, Boulez, Milton Babbitt
Milton Babbitt
Milton Byron Babbitt was an American composer, music theorist, and teacher. He is particularly noted for his serial and electronic music.-Biography:...
, Luigi Nono
Luigi Nono
Luigi Nono was an Italian avant-garde composer of classical music and remains one of the most prominent composers of the 20th century.- Early years :Born in Venice, he was a member of a wealthy artistic family, and his grandfather was a notable painter...
and Edgard Varèse
Edgard Varèse
Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varèse, , whose name was also spelled Edgar Varèse , was an innovative French-born composer who spent the greater part of his career in the United States....
all wrote Electroacoustic music, often promoted in "happening
Happening
A happening is a performance, event or situation meant to be considered art, usually as performance art. Happenings take place anywhere , are often multi-disciplinary, with a nonlinear narrative and the active participation of the audience...
s".
From the early 1950s onwards, Cage introduced elements of chance into his music. This has resulted in various musical techniques such as indeterminacy
Indeterminacy in music
Indeterminacy in music, which began early in the twentieth century in the music of Charles Ives, and was continued in the 1930s by Henry Cowell and carried on by his student, the experimental music composer John Cage beginning in 1951 , came to refer to the movement which grew up around Cage...
, aleatoric music
Aleatoric music
Aleatoric music is music in which some element of the composition is left to chance, and/or some primary element of a composed work's realization is left to the determination of its performer...
, stochastic music, intuitive music
Intuitive music
Intuitive music is a form of musical improvisation based on instant creation in which fixed principles or rules may or may not have been given. It is a type of process music where instead of a traditional music score, verbal or graphic instructions and ideas are provided to the performers...
, and free improvisation
Free improvisation
Free improvisation or free music is improvised music without any rules beyond the logic or inclination of the musician involved. The term can refer to both a technique and as a recognizable genre in its own right....
. Process music
Process music
Process music is music that arises from a process. It may make that process audible to the listener, or the process may be concealed. Primarily begun in the 1960s, diverse composers have employed divergent methods and styles of process...
(Karlheinz Stockhausen
Karlheinz Stockhausen
Karlheinz Stockhausen was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Another critic calls him "one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music"...
Prozession, Aus den sieben Tagen
Aus den Sieben Tagen
Aus den sieben Tagen is a collection of 15 text compositions by Karlheinz Stockhausen, composed in May 1968, in reaction to a personal crisis, and characterized as "Intuitive music"—music produced primarily from the intuition rather than the intellect of the performer...
; and Steve Reich
Steve Reich
Stephen Michael "Steve" Reich is an American composer who together with La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass is a pioneering composer of minimal music...
Piano Phase, Clapping Music) explores a particular process which is essentially laid bare in the work. The term Experimental music
Experimental music
Experimental music refers, in the English-language literature, to a compositional tradition which arose in the mid-20th century, applied particularly in North America to music composed in such a way that its outcome is unforeseeable. Its most famous and influential exponent was John Cage...
seems to have been coined by Cage who was interested in writing complete works that performed an unpredictable action (Mauceri 1997, 197), according to the definition "an experimental action is one the outcome of which is not foreseen" (Cage 1961, 39). The term is also used to describe music within specific genres that pushes against their boundaries or definitions, or else whose approach is a hybrid of disparate styles, or incorporates unorthodox, new, distinctly unique ingredients.
Important cultural trends often informed music of this period, romantic, modernist, neoclassical, postmodernist or otherwise. Igor Stravinsky
Igor Stravinsky
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky ; 6 April 1971) was a Russian, later naturalized French, and then naturalized American composer, pianist, and conductor....
and Sergei Prokofiev
Sergei Prokofiev
Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev was a Russian composer, pianist and conductor who mastered numerous musical genres and is regarded as one of the major composers of the 20th century...
were particularly drawn to primitivism
Primitivism
Primitivism is a Western art movement that borrows visual forms from non-Western or prehistoric peoples, such as Paul Gauguin's inclusion of Tahitian motifs in paintings and ceramics...
in their early careers, as explored in works such as The Rite of Spring
The Rite of Spring
The Rite of Spring, original French title Le sacre du printemps , is a ballet with music by Igor Stravinsky; choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky; and concept, set design and costumes by Nicholas Roerich...
and Chout
Chout
Chout, Op. 21 , is the usual English-language title of a ballet by Sergei Prokofiev, written in two versions between 1915 and 1921. It is sometimes known as "The Tale of the Buffoon", or simply "The Buffoon"...
. Other Russians, notably Dmitri Shostakovich
Dmitri Shostakovich
Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was a Soviet Russian composer and one of the most celebrated composers of the 20th century....
, reflected the social impact of communism
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
and subsequently had to work within the strictures of socialist realism
Socialist realism
Socialist realism is a style of realistic art which was developed in the Soviet Union and became a dominant style in other communist countries. Socialist realism is a teleologically-oriented style having its purpose the furtherance of the goals of socialism and communism...
in their music (McBurney 2004). Other composers, such as Benjamin Britten
Benjamin Britten
Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten, OM CH was an English composer, conductor, and pianist. He showed talent from an early age, and first came to public attention with the a cappella choral work A Boy Was Born in 1934. With the premiere of his opera Peter Grimes in 1945, he leapt to...
(War Requiem
War Requiem
The War Requiem, Op. 66 is a large-scale, non-liturgical setting of the Requiem Mass composed by Benjamin Britten mostly in 1961 and completed January 1962. Interspersed with the traditional Latin texts, in telling juxtaposition, are settings of Wilfred Owen poems...
), explored political themes in their works, albeit entirely at their own volition (Evans 1979, 450). Nationalism was also an important means of expression in the early part of the century. The culture of the United States
Culture of the United States
The Culture of the United States is a Western culture originally influenced by European cultures. It has been developing since long before the United States became a country with its own unique social and cultural characteristics such as dialect, music, arts, social habits, cuisine, and folklore...
of America, especially, began informing an American vernacular style of classical music, notably in the works of Charles Ives
Charles Ives
Charles Edward Ives was an American modernist composer. He is one of the first American composers of international renown, though Ives' music was largely ignored during his life, and many of his works went unperformed for many years. Over time, Ives came to be regarded as an "American Original"...
, John Alden Carpenter
John Alden Carpenter
John Alden Carpenter was an American composer.-Biography:Born in Park Ridge, Illinois, Carpenter was raised in a musical household. He was educated at Harvard University, where he studied under John Knowles Paine, and was president of the Glee Club and wrote music for the Hasty-Pudding Club...
, and (later) George Gershwin
George Gershwin
George Gershwin was an American composer and pianist. Gershwin's compositions spanned both popular and classical genres, and his most popular melodies are widely known...
. Folk music
Folk music
Folk music is an English term encompassing both traditional folk music and contemporary folk music. The term originated in the 19th century. Traditional folk music has been defined in several ways: as music transmitted by mouth, as music of the lower classes, and as music with unknown composers....
(Vaughan Williams' Variants on Dives and Lazarus, Gustav Holst
Gustav Holst
Gustav Theodore Holst was an English composer. He is most famous for his orchestral suite The Planets....
's A Somerset Rhapsody) and Jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
(Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein
Leonard Bernstein
Leonard Bernstein August 25, 1918 – October 14, 1990) was an American conductor, composer, author, music lecturer and pianist. He was among the first conductors born and educated in the United States of America to receive worldwide acclaim...
, Darius Milhaud
Darius Milhaud
Darius Milhaud was a French composer and teacher. He was a member of Les Six—also known as The Group of Six—and one of the most prolific composers of the 20th century. His compositions are influenced by jazz and make use of polytonality...
's La création du monde
La Création du Monde
The composition La création du monde, Op. 81a, is a 20-minute-long ballet with music composed by Darius Milhaud, in 1922-1923,which outlines the Creation of the World, based on African folk mythology.- History :...
) were also influential.
In the latter quarter of the century, eclecticism
Eclecticism in music
Eclecticism is used to describe a composer's conscious use of styles alien to his nature, or from one or more historical styles. The term is also used pejoratively to describe music whose composer, thought to be lacking originality, appears to have freely drawn on other models .-Sources:* Kennedy,...
and polystylism
Polystylism
Polystylism is the use of multiple styles or techniques in literature, art, film, or, especially, music, and is a postmodern characteristic.Some prominent contemporary polystylist composers include Peter Maxwell Davies, Michael Colgrass, Lera Auerbach, Sofia Gubaidulina, George Rochberg, Alfred...
became important. These, as well as minimalism, New Complexity
New Complexity
In music, the New Complexity is a term dating from the 1980s, principally applied to composers seeking a "complex, multi-layered interplay of evolutionary processes occurring simultaneously within every dimension of the musical material" ....
and New Simplicity
New Simplicity
New Simplicity was a stylistic tendency amongst some of the younger generation of German composers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, reacting against not only the European avant garde of the 1950s and 1960s, but also against the broader tendency toward objectivity found from the beginning of the...
, are more fully explored in their respective articles. The term postmodern music
Postmodern music
Postmodern music is either simply music of the postmodern era, or music that follows aesthetical and philosophical trends of postmodernism. As the name suggests, the postmodernist movement formed partly in reaction to modernism...
is often applied to music that "reacts" to Modernism, though it is not always clear what the "reaction" precisely is.
Romantic style
At the end of the 19th century (often called the Fin de siècleFin de siècle
Fin de siècle is French for "end of the century". The term sometimes encompasses both the closing and onset of an era, as it was felt to be a period of degeneration, but at the same time a period of hope for a new beginning...
), the Romantic
Romantic music
Romantic music or music in the Romantic Period is a musicological and artistic term referring to a particular period, theory, compositional practice, and canon in Western music history, from 1810 to 1900....
style was starting to break apart, moving along various parallel courses, such as Impressionism
Impressionist music
Impressionism in music was a tendency in European classical music, mainly in France, which appeared in the late nineteenth century and continued into the middle of the twentieth century. Similarly to its precursor in the visual arts, musical impressionism focuses on a suggestion and an atmosphere...
and Post-romanticism
Post-romanticism
Post-romanticism or Postromanticism refers to a range of cultural products and attitudes emerging in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, after the period of Romanticism....
. In the 20th century, the different styles that emerged from the music of the previous century influenced composers to follow new trends, sometimes as a reaction to that music, sometimes as an extension of it, and both trends co-existed well into the 20th century. The former trends, such as Expressionism
Expressionism (music)
,Expressionism as a musical genre is difficult to exactly define. It is, however, one of the most important movements of 20th Century music. The three central figures of musical expressionism are Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils, Anton Webern and Alban Berg, the so-called Second Viennese...
are discussed later. In the early part of the 20th century, many composers wrote music which was an extension of 19th-century Romantic music, and traditional instrumental groupings such as the orchestra
Orchestra
An orchestra is a sizable instrumental ensemble that contains sections of string, brass, woodwind, and percussion instruments. The term orchestra derives from the Greek ορχήστρα, the name for the area in front of an ancient Greek stage reserved for the Greek chorus...
and string quartet
String quartet
A string quartet is a musical ensemble of four string players – usually two violin players, a violist and a cellist – or a piece written to be performed by such a group...
remained the most typical. Traditional forms such as the symphony
Symphony
A symphony is an extended musical composition in Western classical music, scored almost always for orchestra. A symphony usually contains at least one movement or episode composed according to the sonata principle...
and concerto
Concerto
A concerto is a musical work usually composed in three parts or movements, in which one solo instrument is accompanied by an orchestra.The etymology is uncertain, but the word seems to have originated from the conjunction of the two Latin words...
remained in use. Gustav Mahler
Gustav Mahler
Gustav Mahler was a late-Romantic Austrian composer and one of the leading conductors of his generation. He was born in the village of Kalischt, Bohemia, in what was then Austria-Hungary, now Kaliště in the Czech Republic...
and Jean Sibelius
Jean Sibelius
Jean Sibelius was a Finnish composer of the later Romantic period whose music played an important role in the formation of the Finnish national identity. His mastery of the orchestra has been described as "prodigious."...
are examples of composers who took the traditional symphonic forms and reworked them. (See Romantic Music
Romantic music
Romantic music or music in the Romantic Period is a musicological and artistic term referring to a particular period, theory, compositional practice, and canon in Western music history, from 1810 to 1900....
) Some writers hold that the Schoenberg's work is squarely within the late-Romantic tradition of Wagner and Brahms (Neighbour 2001, 582) and, more generally, that "the composer who most directly and completely connects late Wagner and the 20th century is Arnold Schoenberg" (Salzman 1988, 10).
Impressionism
Impressionism started in France as a reaction, led by Claude DebussyClaude Debussy
Claude-Achille Debussy was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures working within the field of impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions...
, against the emotional exuberance and epic themes of German Romanticism exemplified by Wagner
Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, theatre director, philosopher, music theorist, poet, essayist and writer primarily known for his operas...
. In Debussy's view, art was a sensuous experience, rather than an intellectual or ethical one. He urged his countrymen to rediscover the French masters of the 18th century, for whom music was meant to charm, to entertain, and to serve as a "fantasy of the senses" (Machlis 1979, 86–87). Other composers associated with impressionism include Maurice Ravel
Maurice Ravel
Joseph-Maurice Ravel was a French composer known especially for his melodies, orchestral and instrumental textures and effects...
, Albert Roussel
Albert Roussel
Albert Charles Paul Marie Roussel was a French composer. He spent seven years as a midshipman, turned to music as an adult, and became one of the most prominent French composers of the interwar period...
, Isaac Albéniz
Isaac Albéniz
Isaac Manuel Francisco Albéniz y Pascual was a Spanish Catalan pianist and composer best known for his piano works based on folk music idioms .-Life:Born in Camprodon, province of Girona, to Ángel Albéniz and his wife Dolors Pascual, Albéniz...
, Paul Dukas
Paul Dukas
Paul Abraham Dukas was a French composer, critic, scholar and teacher. A studious man, of retiring personality, he was intensely self-critical, and he abandoned and destroyed many of his compositions...
, Manuel de Falla
Manuel de Falla
Manuel de Falla y Matheu was a Spanish Andalusian composer of classical music. With Isaac Albéniz, Enrique Granados and Joaquín Turina he is one of Spain's most important musicians of the first half of the 20th century....
, Charles Martin Loeffler
Charles Martin Loeffler
Charles Martin Loeffler was a German-born American violinist and composer.- Birthplace :Throughout his career Loeffler claimed to have been born in Mulhouse, Alsace and almost all music encyclopedias give this fabricated information. In his lifetime articles were published dissecting his...
, Charles Griffes
Charles Griffes
Charles Tomlinson Griffes was an American composer for piano, chamber ensembles and for voice.-Musical career:...
, Frederick Delius
Frederick Delius
Frederick Theodore Albert Delius, CH was an English composer. Born in the north of England to a prosperous mercantile family of German extraction, he resisted attempts to recruit him to commerce...
, Ottorino Respighi
Ottorino Respighi
Ottorino Respighi was an Italian composer, musicologist and conductor. He is best known for his orchestral "Roman trilogy": Fountains of Rome ; Pines of Rome ; and Roman Festivals...
, and Karol Szymanowski
Karol Szymanowski
Karol Maciej Szymanowski was a Polish composer and pianist.-Life:Szymanowski was born into a wealthy land-owning Polish gentry family in Tymoszówka, then in the Russian Empire, now in Cherkasy Oblast, Ukraine. He studied music privately with his father before going to Gustav Neuhaus'...
(Machlis 1979, 115–18). Many French composers continued impressionism's language through the 1920s and later, including Albert Roussel
Albert Roussel
Albert Charles Paul Marie Roussel was a French composer. He spent seven years as a midshipman, turned to music as an adult, and became one of the most prominent French composers of the interwar period...
, Charles Koechlin
Charles Koechlin
Charles Louis Eugène Koechlin was a French composer, teacher and writer on music. He was a political radical all his life and a passionate enthusiast for such diverse things as medieval music, The Jungle Book of Rudyard Kipling, Johann Sebastian Bach, film stars , travelling, stereoscopic...
, André Caplet
André Caplet
André Caplet was a French composer and conductor now known primarily through his orchestrations of works by Claude Debussy.-Biography:...
, and, later, Olivier Messiaen
Olivier Messiaen
Olivier Messiaen was a French composer, organist and ornithologist, one of the major composers of the 20th century. His music is rhythmically complex ; harmonically and melodically it is based on modes of limited transposition, which he abstracted from his early compositions and improvisations...
. Composers from non-Western cultures, such as Tōru Takemitsu
Toru Takemitsu
was a Japanese composer and writer on aesthetics and music theory. Largely self-taught, Takemitsu possessed consummate skill in the subtle manipulation of instrumental and orchestral timbre...
, and jazz musicians such as Duke Ellington
Duke Ellington
Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington was an American composer, pianist, and big band leader. Ellington wrote over 1,000 compositions...
, Gil Evans
Gil Evans
Gil Evans was a jazz pianist, arranger, composer and bandleader, active in the United States...
, Art Tatum
Art Tatum
Arthur "Art" Tatum, Jr. was an American jazz pianist and virtuoso who played with phenomenal facility despite being nearly blind.Tatum is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest jazz pianists of all time...
, and Cecil Taylor
Cecil Taylor
Cecil Percival Taylor is an American pianist and poet. Classically trained, Taylor is generally acknowledged as one of the pioneers of free jazz. His music is characterized by an extremely energetic, physical approach, producing complex improvised sounds, frequently involving tone clusters and...
, also have been strongly influenced by the impressionist musical language (Pasler 2001).
Modernism
Modernism started as a reaction to late 19th-century Romanticism and was characterized by a desire for or belief in progress (especially in scienceScience
Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe...
and politics
Politics
Politics is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. The term is generally applied to the art or science of running governmental or state affairs, including behavior within civil governments, but also applies to institutions, fields, and special interest groups such as the...
) and was often accompanied by a complete break with the past and, most particularly, a rejection of the common practice
Common practice period
The common practice period, in the history of Western art music , spanning the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic periods, lasted from c. 1600 to c. 1900.-General characteristics:...
. Surrealism
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
was an important early manifestation of this. Modernism covers most of the movements that are described below. Postmodernism was the reaction to Modernism.
Free dissonance and experimentalism
In the early part of the 20th century, Charles IvesCharles Ives
Charles Edward Ives was an American modernist composer. He is one of the first American composers of international renown, though Ives' music was largely ignored during his life, and many of his works went unperformed for many years. Over time, Ives came to be regarded as an "American Original"...
integrated American and European traditions as well as vernacular and church styles, while using innovative techniques in his rhythm, harmony, and form (Burkholder 2001). His technique included the use of polytonality
Polytonality
The musical use of more than one key simultaneously is polytonality . Bitonality is the use of only two different keys at the same time...
, polyrhythm
Polyrhythm
Polyrhythm is the simultaneous sounding of two or more independent rhythms.Polyrhythm in general is a nonspecific term for the simultaneous occurrence of two or more conflicting rhythms, of which cross-rhythm is a specific and definable subset.—Novotney Polyrhythms can be distinguished from...
, tone cluster
Tone cluster
A tone cluster is a musical chord comprising at least three consecutive tones in a scale. Prototypical tone clusters are based on the chromatic scale, and are separated by semitones. For instance, three adjacent piano keys struck simultaneously produce a tone cluster...
s, aleatoric
Aleatoric music
Aleatoric music is music in which some element of the composition is left to chance, and/or some primary element of a composed work's realization is left to the determination of its performer...
elements, and quarter tone
Quarter tone
A quarter tone , is a pitch halfway between the usual notes of a chromatic scale, an interval about half as wide as a semitone, which is half a whole tone....
s. Edgard Varèse
Edgard Varèse
Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varèse, , whose name was also spelled Edgar Varèse , was an innovative French-born composer who spent the greater part of his career in the United States....
wrote highly dissonant pieces that utilized unusual sonorities and futuristic, scientific sounding names. He pioneered the use of new instruments and electronic resources
Electronic music
Electronic music is music that employs electronic musical instruments and electronic music technology in its production. In general a distinction can be made between sound produced using electromechanical means and that produced using electronic technology. Examples of electromechanical sound...
(see below).
Futurism
At its conception, Futurism was an Italian artistic movement founded in 1909 by Filippo Tommaso MarinettiFilippo Tommaso Marinetti
Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti was an Italian poet and editor, the founder of the Futurist movement, and a fascist ideologue.-Childhood and adolescence:...
; it was quickly embraced by the Russian avant garde. In 1913, the painter Luigi Russolo
Luigi Russolo
Luigi Russolo was an Italian Futurist painter and composer, and the author of the manifesto The Art of Noises . He is often regarded as one of the first noise music experimental composers with his performances of "noise concerts" in 1913-14 and then again after World War I, notably in Paris in 1921...
published a manifesto, L'arte dei rumori (The Art of Noises), calling for the incorporation of noises of every kind into music (Russolo 1913). In addition to Russolo, composers directly associated with this movement include the Italians Silvio Mix, Nuccio Fiorda, Franco Casavola
Franco Casavola
Franco Casavola was a Futurist composer and theorist.-Futurist movement:In a letter dated 1 October 1922, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote to the composer, theorist and writer Franco Casavola:...
, and Pannigi (whose 1922 Ballo meccanico included two motorcycles), and the Russians Artur Lourié, Mikhail Matyushin
Mikhail Matyushin
Michael Vasilyevich Matyuschin was a Russian painter and composer, leading member of the Russian avant-garde. In 1910–1913 Matyushin and his wife Elena Guro were key members of the Union of the Youth, an association of Russian Futurists...
, and Nikolai Roslavets
Nikolai Roslavets
Nikolai Andreevich Roslavets was a significant Soviet modernist composer. Roslavets was a convinced modernist and cosmopolitan thinker; his music was officially suppressed from 1930 onwards....
. Though few of the futurist works of these composers are performed today, the influence of futurism on the later development of 20th-century music was enormous. Sergei Prokofiev
Sergei Prokofiev
Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev was a Russian composer, pianist and conductor who mastered numerous musical genres and is regarded as one of the major composers of the 20th century...
, Maurice Ravel
Maurice Ravel
Joseph-Maurice Ravel was a French composer known especially for his melodies, orchestral and instrumental textures and effects...
, Igor Stravinsky
Igor Stravinsky
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky ; 6 April 1971) was a Russian, later naturalized French, and then naturalized American composer, pianist, and conductor....
, Arthur Honegger
Arthur Honegger
Arthur Honegger was a Swiss composer, who was born in France and lived a large part of his life in Paris. He was a member of Les six. His most frequently performed work is probably the orchestral work Pacific 231, which is interpreted as imitating the sound of a steam locomotive.-Biography:Born...
, George Antheil
George Antheil
George Antheil was an American avant-garde composer, pianist, author and inventor. A self-described "Bad Boy of Music", his modernist compositions amazed and appalled listeners in Europe and the US during the 1920s with their cacophonous celebration of mechanical devices.Returning permanently to...
, Leo Ornstein
Leo Ornstein
Leo Ornstein was a leading American experimental composer and pianist of the early twentieth century...
, and Edgard Varèse are among the notable composers in the first half of the century who were influenced by futurism. Characteristic features of later 20th-century music with origins in futurism include the prepared piano
Prepared piano
A prepared piano is a piano that has had its sound altered by placing objects between or on the strings or on the hammers or dampers....
, integral serialism
Serialism
In music, serialism is a method or technique of composition that uses a series of values to manipulate different musical elements. Serialism began primarily with Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, though his contemporaries were also working to establish serialism as one example of...
, extended vocal techniques, graphic notation, improvisation
Musical improvisation
Musical improvisation is the creative activity of immediate musical composition, which combines performance with communication of emotions and instrumental technique as well as spontaneous response to other musicians...
, and minimalism
Minimalist music
Minimal music is a style of music associated with the work of American composers La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass. It originated in the New York Downtown scene of the 1960s and was initially viewed as a form of experimental music called the New York Hypnotic School....
(Dennis & Powell 2001).
Expressionism
Expressionism was a prominent artistic trend associated especially with Austria and Germany before, during, and immediately after World War I. In some measure a reaction against the perceived passive nature of impressionism, it emphasized an eruptive immediacy of expressive feeling, often based on the psychology of the unconscious. Expressionism is primarily identified with Arnold Schoenberg’s "free atonal’ period" (1908–1921), in particular the monodrama ErwartungErwartung
Erwartung , Op.17 is a one-act opera by Arnold Schoenberg to a libretto by Marie Pappenheim. Composed in 1909, it was not premiered until June 6, 1924 in Prague conducted by Alexander Zemlinsky with Marie Gutheil-Schoder as the soprano. The work takes the unusual form of a monologue for solo...
, the Klavierstück, op. 11, no. 3, and the first and last of his Five Orchestral Pieces, op. 16. Certain works from this same period by his pupils Alban Berg and Anton Webern are also usually included. Although this music sets out from Wagner’s chromatic harmony (especially Kundry’s music in Parsifal
Parsifal
Parsifal is an opera in three acts by Richard Wagner. It is loosely based on Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, the 13th century epic poem of the Arthurian knight Parzival and his quest for the Holy Grail, and on Chrétien de Troyes' Perceval, the Story of the Grail.Wagner first conceived the work...
), it tends to avoid cadence, repetition, sequence, balanced phrases, and any reference to traditional forms or procedures, for which reason it came to be associated with a rejection of tradition. Other composers active in approximately this period such as Gustav Mahler
Gustav Mahler
Gustav Mahler was a late-Romantic Austrian composer and one of the leading conductors of his generation. He was born in the village of Kalischt, Bohemia, in what was then Austria-Hungary, now Kaliště in the Czech Republic...
, Alexander Scriabin
Alexander Scriabin
Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin was a Russian composer and pianist who initially developed a lyrical and idiosyncratic tonal language inspired by the music of Frédéric Chopin. Quite independent of the innovations of Arnold Schoenberg, Scriabin developed an increasingly atonal musical system,...
, Josef Matthias Hauer
Josef Matthias Hauer
Josef Mattias Hauer was an Austrian composer and music theorist. He is most famous for developing, independent of and a year or two before Arnold Schoenberg, a method for composing with all 12 notes of the chromatic scale.Hauer "detested all art that expressed ideas, programmes or feelings,"...
, Igor Stravinsky
Igor Stravinsky
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky ; 6 April 1971) was a Russian, later naturalized French, and then naturalized American composer, pianist, and conductor....
, Karol Szymanowski
Karol Szymanowski
Karol Maciej Szymanowski was a Polish composer and pianist.-Life:Szymanowski was born into a wealthy land-owning Polish gentry family in Tymoszówka, then in the Russian Empire, now in Cherkasy Oblast, Ukraine. He studied music privately with his father before going to Gustav Neuhaus'...
, Béla Bartók
Béla Bartók
Béla Viktor János Bartók was a Hungarian composer and pianist. He is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century and is regarded, along with Liszt, as Hungary's greatest composer...
, Paul Hindemith
Paul Hindemith
Paul Hindemith was a German composer, violist, violinist, teacher, music theorist and conductor.- Biography :Born in Hanau, near Frankfurt, Hindemith was taught the violin as a child...
, Charles Ives
Charles Ives
Charles Edward Ives was an American modernist composer. He is one of the first American composers of international renown, though Ives' music was largely ignored during his life, and many of his works went unperformed for many years. Over time, Ives came to be regarded as an "American Original"...
, and Ernst Krenek
Ernst Krenek
Ernst Krenek was an Austrian of Czech origin and, from 1945, American composer. He explored atonality and other modern styles and wrote a number of books, including Music Here and Now , a study of Johannes Ockeghem , and Horizons Circled: Reflections on my Music...
also exhibit expressionist traits, while important stage works of the 1920s by Kurt Weill
Kurt Weill
Kurt Julian Weill was a German-Jewish composer, active from the 1920s, and in his later years in the United States. He was a leading composer for the stage who was best known for his fruitful collaborations with Bertolt Brecht...
, Hindemith, and Krenek retain expressionistic textual and visual aspects even though their musical language no longer reflects expressionism's aesthetic principles. By the late 1920s, though many composers continued to write in a vaguely expressionist manner, it was being supplanted by the more impersonal style of the German Neue Sachlichkeit
New Objectivity
The New Objectivity is a term used to characterize the attitude of public life in Weimar Germany as well as the art, literature, music, and architecture created to adapt to it...
and neoclassicism
Neoclassicism (music)
Neoclassicism in music was a twentieth-century trend, particularly current in the period between the two World Wars, in which composers sought to return to aesthetic precepts associated with the broadly defined concept of "classicism", namely order, balance, clarity, economy, and emotional restraint...
. Because expressionism, like any movement that had been stigmatized by the Nazis, gained a sympathetic reconsideration following World War II, expressionist music resurfaced in works by composers such as Hans Werner Henze
Hans Werner Henze
Hans Werner Henze is a German composer of prodigious output best known for "his consistent cultivation of music for the theatre throughout his life"...
, Pierre Boulez
Pierre Boulez
Pierre Boulez is a French composer of contemporary classical music, a pianist, and a conductor.-Early years:Boulez was born in Montbrison, Loire, France. As a child he began piano lessons and demonstrated aptitude in both music and mathematics...
, Peter Maxwell Davies
Peter Maxwell Davies
Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, CBE is an English composer and conductor and is currently Master of the Queen's Music.-Biography:...
, Wolfgang Rihm
Wolfgang Rihm
Wolfgang Rihm is a German composer.Rihm is Head of the Institute of Modern Music at the Karlsruhe Conservatory of Music and has been composer in residence at the Lucerne Festival and the Salzburg Festival...
, and Bernd Alois Zimmermann
Bernd Alois Zimmermann
Bernd Alois Zimmermann was a post-WWII West German composer. He is perhaps best known for his opera Die Soldaten which is regarded as one of the most important operas of the 20th century...
(Fanning 2001).
Second Viennese School, atonality, twelve-tone technique, and serialism
Arnold SchoenbergArnold Schoenberg
Arnold Schoenberg was an Austrian composer, associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School...
is one of the most significant figures in 20th-century music. While starting off as a Late Romantic influenced by Wagner (Transfigured Night), he moved to Atonality (Drei Klavierstücke
Drei Klavierstücke
Drei Klavierstücke, Op. 11 is a set of pieces for solo piano written by the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg in 1909. They represent an early example of ‘atonality’ in the composer’s work...
and Pierrot Lunaire
Pierrot Lunaire
Dreimal sieben Gedichte aus Albert Girauds 'Pierrot lunaire' , commonly known simply as Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21 , is a melodrama by Arnold Schoenberg...
). In 1921, after several years of research, he developed the twelve-tone technique
Twelve-tone technique
Twelve-tone technique is a method of musical composition devised by Arnold Schoenberg...
of composition, which he first described privately to his associates in 1923 (Schoenberg 1975, 213) (Variations for Orchestra, Op. 31). He later returned to a more tonal style (Kammersymphonie no. 2
Chamber Symphony No. 2 (Schoenberg)
Chamber Symphony No. 2, Op. 38, by Arnold Schoenberg was begun in 1906 and completed in 1939. The work is scored for 2 flutes , 2 oboes , 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets and strings and is divided into two movements, the first marked Adagio and the second marked Con Fuoco-Lento...
). He taught Anton Webern
Anton Webern
Anton Webern was an Austrian composer and conductor. He was a member of the Second Viennese School. As a student and significant follower of Arnold Schoenberg, he became one of the best-known exponents of the twelve-tone technique; in addition, his innovations regarding schematic organization of...
and Alban Berg
Alban Berg
Alban Maria Johannes Berg was an Austrian composer. He was a member of the Second Viennese School with Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, and produced compositions that combined Mahlerian Romanticism with a personal adaptation of Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique.-Early life:Berg was born in...
and these three composers are often referred to as the principle members of the Second Viennese School
Second Viennese School
The Second Viennese School is the group of composers that comprised Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils and close associates in early 20th century Vienna, where he lived and taught, sporadically, between 1903 and 1925...
(Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven—and sometimes Schubert—being regarded as the First Viennese School
First Viennese School
The First Viennese School is a name mostly used to refer to three composers of the Classical period in Western art music in late-18th-century Vienna: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Joseph Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven. Franz Schubert is occasionally added to the list.In German speaking countries, the...
in this context). Webern wrote works using a rigorous 12-tone method and influenced the development of total serialism. Berg often combined the 12-tone method method with Late Romanticism and Post-romanticism
Post-romanticism
Post-romanticism or Postromanticism refers to a range of cultural products and attitudes emerging in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, after the period of Romanticism....
(Violin Concerto
Violin Concerto (Berg)
Alban Berg's Violin Concerto was written in 1935 . It is probably Berg's best-known and most frequently performed instrumental piece.-Conception and composition:...
, which quotes a Bach Choral and uses Classical form). He wrote two major operas (Wozzeck
Wozzeck
Wozzeck is the first opera by the Austrian composer Alban Berg. It was composed between 1914 and 1922 and first performed in 1925. The opera is based on the drama Woyzeck left incomplete by the German playwright Georg Büchner at his death. Berg attended the first production in Vienna of Büchner's...
and Lulu
Lulu (opera)
Lulu is an opera by the composer Alban Berg. The libretto was adapted by Berg himself from Frank Wedekind's plays Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora .-Composition history:...
).
Neoclassicism
In neoclassicism, composers drew inspiration from music of the 18th century. The term neoclassicalNeoclassicism
Neoclassicism is the name given to Western movements in the decorative and visual arts, literature, theatre, music, and architecture that draw inspiration from the "classical" art and culture of Ancient Greece or Ancient Rome...
is applied to several movements in the arts during the 18th and 19th centuries, but the term has become the common name for music that revives earlier practices and techniques. Famous examples include Prokofiev's
Sergei Prokofiev
Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev was a Russian composer, pianist and conductor who mastered numerous musical genres and is regarded as one of the major composers of the 20th century...
Classical Symphony
Symphony No. 1 (Prokofiev)
Sergei Prokofiev began work on his Symphony No. 1 in D major in 1916, but wrote most of it in 1917, finishing work on September 10. It is written in loose imitation of the style of Haydn , and is widely known as the Classical Symphony, a name given to it by the composer...
and Stravinsky's
Igor Stravinsky
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky ; 6 April 1971) was a Russian, later naturalized French, and then naturalized American composer, pianist, and conductor....
Pulcinella
Pulcinella (ballet)
Pulcinella is a ballet by Igor Stravinsky based on an 18th-century play — Pulcinella is a character originating from Commedia dell'arte. The ballet premiered at the Paris Opera on 15 May 1920 under the baton of Ernest Ansermet. The dancer Léonide Massine created both the libretto and choreography,...
. Paul Hindemith
Paul Hindemith
Paul Hindemith was a German composer, violist, violinist, teacher, music theorist and conductor.- Biography :Born in Hanau, near Frankfurt, Hindemith was taught the violin as a child...
(Mathis de Maler) and Darius Milhaud
Darius Milhaud
Darius Milhaud was a French composer and teacher. He was a member of Les Six—also known as The Group of Six—and one of the most prolific composers of the 20th century. His compositions are influenced by jazz and make use of polytonality...
also used this style. Maurice Ravel
Maurice Ravel
Joseph-Maurice Ravel was a French composer known especially for his melodies, orchestral and instrumental textures and effects...
's Le Tombeau de Couperin
Le Tombeau de Couperin
Le tombeau de Couperin is a suite for solo piano by Maurice Ravel, composed between 1914 and 1917, in six movements. Each movement is dedicated to the memory of friends of the composer who had died fighting in World War I...
is often seen as neobaroque (an architectural term), though the distinction between the terms is not always made.
Electronic music
Technological advances in the 20th century enabled composers to use electronicElectronic music
Electronic music is music that employs electronic musical instruments and electronic music technology in its production. In general a distinction can be made between sound produced using electromechanical means and that produced using electronic technology. Examples of electromechanical sound...
means of producing sound.
After the Second World War, magnetic tape
Magnetic tape
Magnetic tape is a medium for magnetic recording, made of a thin magnetizable coating on a long, narrow strip of plastic. It was developed in Germany, based on magnetic wire recording. Devices that record and play back audio and video using magnetic tape are tape recorders and video tape recorders...
became available for the creation of music by recording sounds and then manipulating them in some way. When the source material was acoustical sounds from the everyday world, the term musique concrète
Musique concrète
Musique concrète is a form of electroacoustic music that utilises acousmatic sound as a compositional resource. The compositional material is not restricted to the inclusion of sounds derived from musical instruments or voices, nor to elements traditionally thought of as "musical"...
was used; when the sounds were produced by electronic generators, it was designated electronic music
Electronic music
Electronic music is music that employs electronic musical instruments and electronic music technology in its production. In general a distinction can be made between sound produced using electromechanical means and that produced using electronic technology. Examples of electromechanical sound...
. After the 1950s, the term "electronic music" came to be used for both types. Sometimes such electronic music was combined with more conventional instruments, Stockhausen's Hymnen
Hymnen
Hymnen is an electronic and concrete work, with optional live performers, by Karlheinz Stockhausen, composed in 1966–67, and elaborated in 1969. In the composer's catalog of works, it is "Nr. 22".-Musical form and content:...
, Edgard Varèse
Edgard Varèse
Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varèse, , whose name was also spelled Edgar Varèse , was an innovative French-born composer who spent the greater part of his career in the United States....
's Déserts
Déserts
Déserts is a piece by Edgard Varèse for brass , percussion , piano, and tape. Percussion instruments are exploited for their resonant potential, rather than used solely as accompaniment...
, and Mario Davidovsky
Mario Davidovsky
Mario Davidovsky is an Argentine-American composer. Born in Argentina, he emigrated in 1960 to the US, where he lives today...
's series of Synchronisms are three examples.
Jazz-influenced classical composition
A number of composers combined elements of the jazzJazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
idiom with classical compositional styles, notably Leonard Bernstein
Leonard Bernstein
Leonard Bernstein August 25, 1918 – October 14, 1990) was an American conductor, composer, author, music lecturer and pianist. He was among the first conductors born and educated in the United States of America to receive worldwide acclaim...
, Aaron Copland
Aaron Copland
Aaron Copland was an American composer, composition teacher, writer, and later in his career a conductor of his own and other American music. He was instrumental in forging a distinctly American style of composition, and is often referred to as "the Dean of American Composers"...
, George Gershwin
George Gershwin
George Gershwin was an American composer and pianist. Gershwin's compositions spanned both popular and classical genres, and his most popular melodies are widely known...
, Darius Milhaud
Darius Milhaud
Darius Milhaud was a French composer and teacher. He was a member of Les Six—also known as The Group of Six—and one of the most prolific composers of the 20th century. His compositions are influenced by jazz and make use of polytonality...
, and Maurice Ravel
Maurice Ravel
Joseph-Maurice Ravel was a French composer known especially for his melodies, orchestral and instrumental textures and effects...
.
Postmodern music
Postmodernism is a reaction to Modernism, but it can also be viewed as a response to a deep-seated shift in societal attitude. According to this latter view, Postmodernism began when historic (as opposed to personal) optimism turned to pessimism, at the latest by 1930 (Meyer 1994, 331).John Cage
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...
is a prominent figure in 20th-century music, claimed with some justice both for modernism and postmodernism because the complex intersections between modernism and postmodernism are not reducible to simple schemata (Williams 2002, 241). His influence steadily grew during his lifetime. His best-known work is 4′33″ in which any instrumentalist (or combination of instrumentalists) is instructed not to play for the duration of the work. He often uses elements of chance: Imaginary Landscape No. 4
Imaginary Landscape
Imaginary Landscape is the title of several pieces by American composer John Cage. The series comprises the following works:* Imaginary Landscape No. 1 **for two variable-speed turntables, frequency recordings, muted piano, and cymbal...
for 12 radio receivers, and Music of Changes
Music of Changes
Music of Changes is a piece for solo piano by John Cage. Composed in 1951 for pianist and friend David Tudor, it is Cage's earliest fully indeterminate instrumental work. The process of composition involved applying decisions made using the I Ching, a Chinese classic text that is commonly used as a...
for piano. Sonatas and Interludes
Sonatas and Interludes
Sonatas and Interludes is a collection of twenty pieces for prepared piano by American avant-garde composer John Cage . It was composed in 1946–1948, shortly after Cage's introduction to Indian philosophy and the teachings of art historian Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, both of which became major...
(1946–48) is composed for a prepared piano
Prepared piano
A prepared piano is a piano that has had its sound altered by placing objects between or on the strings or on the hammers or dampers....
: a normal piano whose timbre is dramatically altered by carefully placing various objects inside the piano in contact with the strings (a concept inspired by some of Henry Cowell
Henry Cowell
Henry Cowell was an American composer, music theorist, pianist, teacher, publisher, and impresario. His contribution to the world of music was summed up by Virgil Thomson, writing in the early 1950s:...
's 'String Piano' techniques).
Most of the styles and movements that follow can be classified as "postmodern".
Minimalism
In the later 20th century, composers such as La Monte YoungLa Monte Young
La Monte Thornton Young is an American avant-garde composer, musician, and artist.Young is generally recognized as the first minimalist composer. His works have been included among the most important and radical post-World War II avant-garde, experimental, and contemporary music. Young is...
, Philip Glass
Philip Glass
Philip Glass is an American composer. He is considered to be one of the most influential composers of the late 20th century and is widely acknowledged as a composer who has brought art music to the public .His music is often described as minimalist, along with...
, Terry Riley
Terry Riley
Terrence Mitchell Riley, is an American composer intrinsically associated with the minimalist school of Western classical music and was a pioneer of the movement...
, Steve Reich
Steve Reich
Stephen Michael "Steve" Reich is an American composer who together with La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass is a pioneering composer of minimal music...
, and John Adams began to explore what is now called minimalism
Minimalism
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts...
, in which the work is stripped down to its most fundamental features; the music often features repetition and iteration. An early example is Terry Riley's In C
In C
In C is a semi-aleatoric musical piece composed by Terry Riley in 1964 for any number of people, although he suggests "a group of about 35 is desired if possible but smaller or larger groups will work"...
(1964), an aleatoric work in which short phrases are chosen by the musicians from a set list and played an arbitrary number of times, while the note C is repeated in eighth notes (quavers) behind them. Steve Reich's works Piano Phase
Piano Phase
Piano Phase is a piece of music written in 1967 by the minimalist composer Steve Reich for two pianos. It is his first attempt at applying his "phasing" technique, which he had previously used in the tape pieces It's Gonna Rain and Come Out , to live performance.Reich's phasing works generally...
(1967, for two pianos), and Drumming
Drumming (Reich)
Drumming is a piece by minimalist composer Steve Reich, dating from 1970-1971. Reich began composition of the work after a short visit to Africa and observing music and musical ensembles there, especially under the Anlo Ewe master drummer Gideon Alorwoyie in Ghana. His visit was cut short after...
(1970–71, for percussion, female voices and piccolo) employ the technique called phasing
Phasing
In the compositional technique phasing, the same part is played on two musical instruments, in steady but not identical tempo...
in which a phrase played by one player maintaining a constant pace is played simultaneously by another but at a slightly quicker pace. This causes the players to go "out of phase" with each other and the performance may continue until they come back in phase. Philip Glass's 1 + 1 (1968) employs the additive process in which short phrases are slowly expanded. La Monte Young's Compositions 1960 employes very long tones, exceptionally high volumes and extra-musical techniques such as "draw a straight line and follow it" or "build a fire". Michael Nyman
Michael Nyman
Michael Laurence Nyman, CBE is an English composer of minimalist music, pianist, librettist and musicologist, known for the many film scores he wrote during his lengthy collaboration with the filmmaker Peter Greenaway, and his multi-platinum soundtrack album to Jane Campion's The Piano...
argues that minimalism was a reaction to and made possible by both serialism and indeterminism (Nyman 1999, 139). (See also experimental music
Experimental music
Experimental music refers, in the English-language literature, to a compositional tradition which arose in the mid-20th century, applied particularly in North America to music composed in such a way that its outcome is unforeseeable. Its most famous and influential exponent was John Cage...
)
Recording technology
The 20th century saw a change in the way in which classical music was heard. Advances in recording technologies, beginning with the rise in popularity of the phonographPhonograph
The phonograph record player, or gramophone is a device introduced in 1877 that has had continued common use for reproducing sound recordings, although when first developed, the phonograph was used to both record and reproduce sounds...
in the early part of the century, and later with the inventions of magnetic tape
Magnetic tape
Magnetic tape is a medium for magnetic recording, made of a thin magnetizable coating on a long, narrow strip of plastic. It was developed in Germany, based on magnetic wire recording. Devices that record and play back audio and video using magnetic tape are tape recorders and video tape recorders...
, the cassette
Compact Cassette
The Compact Cassette, often referred to as audio cassette, cassette tape, cassette, or simply tape, is a magnetic tape sound recording format. It was designed originally for dictation, but improvements in fidelity led the Compact Cassette to supplant the Stereo 8-track cartridge and reel-to-reel...
, DAT
Digital Audio Tape
Digital Audio Tape is a signal recording and playback medium developed by Sony and introduced in 1987. In appearance it is similar to a compact audio cassette, using 4 mm magnetic tape enclosed in a protective shell, but is roughly half the size at 73 mm × 54 mm × 10.5 mm. As...
, and the compact disc
Compact Disc
The Compact Disc is an optical disc used to store digital data. It was originally developed to store and playback sound recordings exclusively, but later expanded to encompass data storage , write-once audio and data storage , rewritable media , Video Compact Discs , Super Video Compact Discs ,...
. In addition, broadcasting
Broadcasting
Broadcasting is the distribution of audio and video content to a dispersed audience via any audio visual medium. Receiving parties may include the general public or a relatively large subset of thereof...
technologies, such as radio
Radio
Radio is the transmission of signals through free space by modulation of electromagnetic waves with frequencies below those of visible light. Electromagnetic radiation travels by means of oscillating electromagnetic fields that pass through the air and the vacuum of space...
and television
Television
Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...
have meant that the concert hall, opera house
Opera house
An opera house is a theatre building used for opera performances that consists of a stage, an orchestra pit, audience seating, and backstage facilities for costumes and set building...
, salon
Salon music
Salon music was a popular music genre in Europe during the 19th century. It was usually written for solo piano in the romantic style, and often performed by the composer at events known as "Salons". Salon compositions are usually fairly short and often focus on virtuoso pianistic display or...
, and domestic music-making are no longer the only means by which a performance can reach its audience.
Spectralism
A musical composition practice where compositional decisions are often informed by the analysis of sound spectra. Prominent spectral composers include Tristan MurailTristan Murail
Tristan Murail is a French composer. His father, Gérard Murail, is a poet and his mother, Marie-Thérèse Barrois, a journalist. One of his brothers, Lorris Murail, and his younger sister Elvire Murail, aka Moka, also write, and his younger sister Marie-Aude Murail is a French children's writer...
and Gérard Grisey
Gérard Grisey
Gérard Grisey was a French composer of contemporary music.-Biography:Gérard Grisey was born in Belfort, France on 17 June 1946. He studied at the Trossingen Conservatory in Germany from 1963 to 1965 before entering the Conservatoire de Paris...
, and the 'post-spectral' composers Kaija Saariaho
Kaija Saariaho
Kaija Saariaho is a Finnish composer.Kaija Saariaho studied composition in Helsinki, Freiburg and Paris, where she has lived since 1982. Her studies and research at IRCAM have had a major influence on her music and her characteristically luxuriant and mysterious textures are often created by...
and Magnus Lindberg
Magnus Lindberg
Magnus Lindberg is a Finnish composer and pianist. He is currently the composer-in-residence at the New York Philharmonic.-Education:...
.
Other notable 20th-century composers
- Malcolm ArnoldMalcolm ArnoldSir Malcolm Henry Arnold, CBE was an English composer and symphonist.Malcolm Arnold began his career playing trumpet professionally, but by age thirty his life was devoted to composition. He was ranked with Benjamin Britten as one of the most sought-after composers in Britain...
- Arnold BaxArnold BaxSir Arnold Edward Trevor Bax, KCVO was an English composer and poet. His musical style blended elements of romanticism and impressionism, often with influences from Irish literature and landscape. His orchestral scores are noted for their complexity and colourful instrumentation...
- Harrison BirtwistleHarrison BirtwistleSir Harrison Paul Birtwistle CH is a British contemporary composer.-Life:Birtwistle was born in Accrington, a mill town in Lancashire some 20 miles north of Manchester. His interest in music was encouraged by his mother, who bought him a clarinet when he was seven, and arranged for him to have...
- Ernest BlochErnest BlochErnest Bloch was a Swiss-born American composer.-Life:Bloch was born in Geneva and began playing the violin at age 9. He began composing soon afterwards. He studied music at the conservatory in Brussels, where his teachers included the celebrated Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe...
- William BolcomWilliam BolcomWilliam Elden Bolcom is an American composer and pianist. He has received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Medal of Arts, two Grammy Awards, the Detroit Music Award and was named 2007 Composer of the Year by Musical America. Bolcom taught composition at the University of Michigan from 1973–2008...
- Frank BridgeFrank BridgeFrank Bridge was an English composer and violist.-Life:Bridge was born in Brighton and studied at the Royal College of Music in London from 1899 to 1903 under Charles Villiers Stanford and others...
- George CrumbGeorge CrumbGeorge Crumb is an American composer of contemporary classical music. He is noted as an explorer of unusual timbres, alternative forms of notation, and extended instrumental and vocal techniques. Examples include seagull effect for the cello , metallic vibrato for the piano George Crumb (born...
- Luigi DallapiccolaLuigi DallapiccolaLuigi Dallapiccola was an Italian composer known for his lyrical twelve-tone compositions.-Biography:Dallapiccola was born at Pisino d'Istria , to Italian parents....
- Frederick DeliusFrederick DeliusFrederick Theodore Albert Delius, CH was an English composer. Born in the north of England to a prosperous mercantile family of German extraction, he resisted attempts to recruit him to commerce...
- Franco DonatoniFranco DonatoniFranco Donatoni was an Italian composer.Born in Verona, he started studying violin at the age of seven, and frequented the local Music Academy...
- Henri DutilleuxHenri DutilleuxHenri Dutilleux is one of the most important French composers of the second half of the 20th century, producing work in the tradition of Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, and Albert Roussel, but in a style distinctly his own...
- Edward ElgarEdward ElgarSir Edward William Elgar, 1st Baronet OM, GCVO was an English composer, many of whose works have entered the British and international classical concert repertoire. Among his best-known compositions are orchestral works including the Enigma Variations, the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, concertos...
- Brian EnoBrian EnoBrian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno , commonly known as Brian Eno or simply as Eno , is an English musician, composer, record producer, singer and visual artist, known as one of the principal innovators of ambient music.Eno studied at Colchester Institute art school in Essex,...
- Gabriel FauréGabriel FauréGabriel Urbain Fauré was a French composer, organist, pianist and teacher. He was one of the foremost French composers of his generation, and his musical style influenced many 20th century composers...
- Morton FeldmanMorton FeldmanMorton Feldman was an American composer, born in New York City.A major figure in 20th century music, Feldman was a pioneer of indeterminate music, a development associated with the experimental New York School of composers also including John Cage, Christian Wolff, and Earle Brown...
- Henryk GóreckiHenryk GóreckiHenryk Mikołaj Górecki was a composer of contemporary classical music. He studied at the State Higher School of Music in Katowice between 1955 and 1960. In 1968, he joined the faculty and rose to provost before resigning in 1979. Górecki became a leading figure of the Polish avant-garde during...
- Reinhold GlièreReinhold GlièreReinhold Moritzevich Glière was a Russian and Soviet composer of German–Polish descent.- Biography :Glière was born in Kiev, Ukraine...
- Percy GraingerPercy GraingerGeorge Percy Aldridge Grainger , known as Percy Grainger, was an Australian-born composer, arranger and pianist. In the course of a long and innovative career he played a prominent role in the revival of interest in British folk music in the early years of the 20th century. He also made many...
- Howard HansonHoward HansonHoward Harold Hanson was an American composer, conductor, educator, music theorist, and champion of American classical music. As director for 40 years of the Eastman School of Music, he built a high-quality school and provided opportunities for commissioning and performing American music...
- Roy HarrisRoy HarrisRoy Ellsworth Harris , was an American composer. He wrote much music on American subjects, becoming best known for his Symphony No...
- Lou HarrisonLou HarrisonLou Silver Harrison was an American composer. He was a student of Henry Cowell, Arnold Schoenberg, and K. P. H. Notoprojo Lou Silver Harrison (May 14, 1917 – February 2, 2003) was an American composer. He was a student of Henry Cowell, Arnold Schoenberg, and K. P. H. Notoprojo Lou Silver Harrison...
- Pierre HenryPierre HenryPierre Henry is a French composer, considered a pioneer of the musique concrète genre of electronic music.-Biography:...
- Gustav HolstGustav HolstGustav Theodore Holst was an English composer. He is most famous for his orchestral suite The Planets....
- Alan HovhanessAlan HovhanessAlan Hovhaness was an Armenian-American composer.His music is accessible to the lay listener and often evokes a mood of mystery or contemplation...
- Scott JoplinScott JoplinScott Joplin was an American composer and pianist. Joplin achieved fame for his ragtime compositions, and was later dubbed "The King of Ragtime". During his brief career, Joplin wrote 44 original ragtime pieces, one ragtime ballet, and two operas...
- Aram KhachaturianAram KhachaturianAram Ilyich Khachaturian was a prominent Soviet composer. Khachaturian's works were often influenced by classical Russian music and Armenian folk music...
- Zoltán KodályZoltán KodályZoltán Kodály was a Hungarian composer, ethnomusicologist, pedagogue, linguist, and philosopher. He is best known internationally as the creator of the Kodály Method.-Life:Born in Kecskemét, Kodály learned to play the violin as a child....
- Włodzimierz Kotoński
- György LigetiGyörgy LigetiGyörgy Sándor Ligeti was a composer of contemporary classical music. Born in a Hungarian Jewish family in Transylvania, Romania, he briefly lived in Hungary before becoming an Austrian citizen.-Early life:...
- Witold Lutosławski
- Gian Carlo MenottiGian Carlo MenottiGian Carlo Menotti was an Italian-American composer and librettist. Although he often referred to himself as an American composer, he kept his Italian citizenship. He wrote the classic Christmas opera, Amahl and the Night Visitors, among about two dozen other operas intended to appeal to popular...
- Carl NielsenCarl NielsenCarl August Nielsen , , widely recognised as Denmark's greatest composer, was also a conductor and a violinist. Brought up by poor but musically talented parents on the island of Funen, he demonstrated his musical abilities at an early age...
- Carl OrffCarl OrffCarl Orff was a 20th-century German composer, best known for his cantata Carmina Burana . In addition to his career as a composer, Orff developed an influential method of music education for children.-Early life:...
- Arvo PärtArvo PärtArvo Pärt is an Estonian classical composer and one of the most prominent living composers of sacred music. Since the late 1970s, Pärt has worked in a minimalist style that employs his self-made compositional technique, tintinnabuli. His music also finds its inspiration and influence from...
- Harry PartchHarry PartchHarry Partch was an American composer and instrument creator. He was one of the first twentieth-century composers to work extensively and systematically with microtonal scales, writing much of his music for custom-made instruments that he built himself, tuned in 11-limit just intonation.-Early...
- Krzysztof PendereckiKrzysztof PendereckiKrzysztof Penderecki , born November 23, 1933 in Dębica) is a Polish composer and conductor. His 1960 avant-garde Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima for string orchestra brought him to international attention, and this success was followed by acclaim for his choral St. Luke Passion. Both these...
- Ástor PiazzollaÁstor PiazzollaÁstor Pantaleón Piazzolla was an Argentine tango composer and bandoneón player. His oeuvre revolutionized the traditional tango into a new style termed nuevo tango, incorporating elements from jazz and classical music...
- Francis PoulencFrancis PoulencFrancis Jean Marcel Poulenc was a French composer and a member of the French group Les six. He composed solo piano music, chamber music, oratorio, choral music, opera, ballet music, and orchestral music...
- Giacomo PucciniGiacomo PucciniGiacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini was an Italian composer whose operas, including La bohème, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, and Turandot, are among the most frequently performed in the standard repertoire...
- Sergei RachmaninoffSergei RachmaninoffSergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff was a Russian composer, pianist, and conductor. Rachmaninoff is widely considered one of the finest pianists of his day and, as a composer, one of the last great representatives of Romanticism in Russian classical music...
- Einojuhani RautavaaraEinojuhani RautavaaraEinojuhani Rautavaara is a Finnish composer of contemporary classical music, and is one of the most notable Finnish composers after Jean Sibelius.-Life:...
- Joaquín RodrigoJoaquín RodrigoJoaquín Rodrigo Vidre, 1st Marquis of the Gardens of Aranjuez , commonly known as Joaquín Rodrigo, was a composer of classical music and a virtuoso pianist. Despite being nearly blind from an early age, he achieved great success...
- Ned RoremNed RoremNed Rorem is a Pulitzer prize-winning American composer and diarist. He is best known and most praised for his song settings.-Life:...
- Carl RugglesCarl RugglesCharles "Carl" Sprague Ruggles was an American composer of the American Five group. He wrote finely crafted pieces using "dissonant counterpoint", a term coined by Charles Seeger to describe Ruggles' music...
- Peter SculthorpePeter SculthorpePeter Joshua Sculthorpe AO OBE is an Australian composer. Much of his music has resulted from an interest in the music of Australia's neighbours as well as from the impulse to bring together aspects of native Australian music with that of the heritage of the West...
- Elie SiegmeisterElie SiegmeisterElie Siegmeister was an American composer, educator and author.His varied musical output showed his concern with the development of an authentic American musical vocabulary...
- Alfred SchnittkeAlfred SchnittkeAlfred Schnittke ; November 24, 1934 – August 3, 1998) was a Russian and Soviet composer. Schnittke's early music shows the strong influence of Dmitri Shostakovich. He developed a polystylistic technique in works such as the epic First Symphony and First Concerto Grosso...
- Richard StraussRichard StraussRichard Georg Strauss was a leading German composer of the late Romantic and early modern eras. He is known for his operas, which include Der Rosenkavalier and Salome; his Lieder, especially his Four Last Songs; and his tone poems and orchestral works, such as Death and Transfiguration, Till...
- Josef Tal
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- Galina UstvolskayaGalina UstvolskayaGalina Ivanovna Ustvolskaya, also Ustwolskaja or Oustvolskaia was a Russian composer of classical music.-Early years:From 1937 to 1947 she studied at the college attached to the Leningrad Conservatory . She subsequently became a postgraduate student and taught composition at the college...
- Heitor Villa-LobosHeitor Villa-LobosHeitor Villa-Lobos was a Brazilian composer, described as "the single most significant creative figure in 20th-century Brazilian art music". Villa-Lobos has become the best-known and most significant Latin American composer to date. He wrote numerous orchestral, chamber, instrumental and vocal works...
- William WaltonWilliam WaltonSir William Turner Walton OM was an English composer. During a sixty-year career, he wrote music in several classical genres and styles, from film scores to opera...
- Kurt WeillKurt WeillKurt Julian Weill was a German-Jewish composer, active from the 1920s, and in his later years in the United States. He was a leading composer for the stage who was best known for his fruitful collaborations with Bertolt Brecht...
- Charles WuorinenCharles WuorinenCharles Peter Wuorinen is a prolific Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer born and living in New York City. His catalog of more than 250 compositions includes works for orchestra, opera, chamber music, as well as solo instrumental and vocal works...
- Frank ZappaFrank ZappaFrank Vincent Zappa was an American composer, singer-songwriter, electric guitarist, record producer and film director. In a career spanning more than 30 years, Zappa wrote rock, jazz, orchestral and musique concrète works. He also directed feature-length films and music videos, and designed...
- John ZornJohn ZornJohn Zorn is an American avant-garde composer, arranger, record producer, saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist. Zorn is a prolific artist: he has hundreds of album credits as performer, composer, or producer...
See also
- List of 20th-century classical composers by birth date
- List of 20th-century classical composers by death date
- Contemporary classical musicContemporary classical musicContemporary classical music can be understood as belonging to the period that started in the mid-1970s with the retreat of modernism. However, the term may also be employed in a broader sense to refer to all post-1945 modern musical forms.-Categorization:...
- Acousmatic musicAcousmatic musicAcousmatic music is a form of electroacoustic music that deals specifically with acousmatic sound as a compositional resource. The practice has a historical basis in musique concrète. It can be created using non-acoustic technology, exists only in a recorded format , and is composed for reception...
- Electronic musicElectronic musicElectronic music is music that employs electronic musical instruments and electronic music technology in its production. In general a distinction can be made between sound produced using electromechanical means and that produced using electronic technology. Examples of electromechanical sound...
Further reading
- Ashby, Arved Mark (ed.). 2004. The Pleasure of Modernist Music: Listening, Meaning, Intention, Ideology. Eastman Studies in Music. Rochester: University of Rochester Press. ISBN 9781580461436.
- Crawford, John C., and Dorothy L. Crawford. 1993. Expressionism in Twentieth-Century Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ISBN 0253314739
- Grun, Constantin. 2006. Arnold Schönberg und Richard Wagner: Spuren einer aussergewöhnlichen Beziehung, 2 volumes. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Unipress. ISBN 3-89971-266-8 (volume 1), ISBN 3-89971-267-6 (volume 2)
- Lee, Douglas. 2002. Masterworks of 20th-Century Music: The Modern Repertory of the Symphony Orchestra. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0415938473, ISBN 978-0415938471
- Roberts, Paul. 2008. Claude Debussy. 20th-Century Composers. London and New York: Phaidon Press. ISBN 0714835129, ISBN 978-0714835129
- Salzman, Eric. 2002. Twentieth-Century Music: An Introduction, 4th edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. ISBN 0130959413
- Simms, Bryan R. 1996. Music of the Twentieth Century: Style and Structure, 2nd edition. New York: Schirmer Books; London: Prentice Hall International. ISBN 0028723929
- Teachout, Terry. 1999. "Masterpieces of the Century: A Finale-20th Century Classical Music". Commentary 107, no. 6 (June): 55.
External links
- Fluid Radio, Experimental Frequencies
- The Avant Garde Project, free downloads of out of print avant garde music
- Ircam Paris
- MICROCOSMS: A Simplified Approach to Musical Styles of the Twentieth Century by Phillip Magnuson
- Dolmetsch.com: music history online: music of the 20th-century by Dr. Brian Blood
- Art of the States
- Recordings of classes on 20th-Century Music given by a Dallapiccola pupil
- Contemporary Music from Germany
- The Genetic Memory Show (avant-garde/experimental music on Rice University radio)
- temp’óra - international network dedicated to the promotion of contemporary music. Data bases with thousands of links all over the world.