20th_century_classical

20th century classical music

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History of European art music

Early

Medieval (500 – 1400)

Renaissance (1400 – 1600)

Common practice

Baroque (1600 – 1760)

Classical (1730 – 1820)

Romantic (1815 – 1910)

Modern and contemporary

20th century classical (1900 – 2000)

Contemporary classical (1975 – present)

At the turn of the 20th century classical music was characteristically late Romantic in style, while at the same time the Impressionist movement, spearheaded by Claude Debussy was taking form. America began forming its own vernacular style of classical music, notably in the works of Charles Ives and George Gershwin, while in Vienna, Arnold Schoenberg developed the twelve-tone technique. Classical music in the 20th century varied greatly, from the Neoclassical music of Igor Stravinsky, or the simple harmonies and rhythms of minimalist composers such as Steve Reich, and Philip Glass, to the musique concrète of Pierre Schaeffer and the Intuitive music of Karlheinz Stockhausen; from the total serialism of Pierre Boulez to the aleatoric music of John Cage.

Perhaps the most salient feature during this time period of classical music was the increased use of dissonance. Because of this, the twentieth century is sometimes called the "Dissonant Period" of classical music, following the common practice period, which emphasized consonance (Schwartz and Godfrey 1993, 9–43). The watershed transitional moment was the international Paris Exposition celebrating the centennial of the French Revolution, in 1889 (Fauser 2005). This exposition brought a variety of non-Western performing artists to Paris, influencing Debussy and Mahler in particular.^{citation needed} While some writers hold that Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi- d'un faune and Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht are dramatic departures from Romanticism and have strong modernist traits (Ibid.), others hold that the Schoenberg 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 twentieth century is Arnold Schoenberg" (Salzman 1988, 10).

An important feature of twentieth-century concert music is the splitting of the audience into traditional and avant-garde, with many figures prominent in one world considered minor or unacceptable in the other. Composers such as Anton Webern, Elliott Carter, Edgard Varèse, Milton Babbitt, and Luciano Berio have devoted followings within the avant-garde, but are often attacked outside of it. As time has passed, however, it is increasingly accepted, though by no means universally so, that the boundaries are more porous than the many polemics would lead one to believe: many of the techniques pioneered by the above composers show up in popular music by The Beatles, Deep Purple, Yes, Genesis, King Crimson, Pink Floyd, ELP, Mike Oldfield, Enigma, Vangelis, Jean Michel Jarre and in film scores (plus video game music, to an extent) that draw mass audiences.

It should be kept in mind that this article presents an overview of twentieth-century classical music and many of the composers listed under the following trends and movements may not identify exclusively as such and may be considered as participating in different movements. For instance, at different times during his career, Igor Stravinsky may be considered a romantic, modernist, neoclassicist, and a serialist.

1 Romantic style
2 Post-modernist music
- 2.1 Birth of post-modernism
- 2.2 Minimalism
3 Electronic music
4 Jazz-influenced classical composition
5 Recording Technology
6 Other
7 Notable 20th Century composers
8 See also
9 References
10 External links
- 10.1 Publishers
11 Further reading

Romantic style

Particularly in the early part of the century, many composers wrote music which was an extension of nineteenth-century Romantic music. Harmony, though sometimes complex, was tonal,^{citation needed} and traditional instrumental groupings such as the orchestra and string quartet remained the most usual. Traditional forms such as the symphony and concerto remained in use. (See Romantic Music)

Many prominent composers — among them Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich, Maurice Ravel, and Benjamin Britten — made significant advances in style and technique while still employing a melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, structural, and textural language which was related to that of the nineteenth century.

Music along these lines was written throughout the twentieth century, and continues to be written today.

Minimalist composers such as Philip Glass have also been said^{weasel words} to evoke some sense of nineteenth-century melodic and harmonic language, but depart radically in structure and texture, harmony, ideas, development, counterpoint and rhythm.

Many other twentieth-century composers^{weasel words} took more experimental routes.

Second Viennese School, atonality, twelve-tone technique, and serialism

See also: atonality

Arnold Schoenberg is one of the most significant figures in 20th century music. His early works are in a late-Romantic style, influenced by Richard Wagner and Gustav Mahler (Neighbour 2001), which he extended by abandoning a tonal framework altogether, instead writing freely atonal music.^{citation needed} In 1921, he developed the twelve-tone technique of composition, which he first described privately to his associates in 1923 (Schoenberg 1975, 213).

Twelve-tone technique itself was later adapted by other composers to control aspects of music other than the pitch of the notes, such as durations, dynamics and modes of attack, creating "total serial music.^{citation needed} In Europe, the "punctual", "pointist", or "pointillist" style of Messiaen's "Mode de valeurs et d'intensités", widely viewed at the time^{weasel words} as being derived from Webern—in which individual tones' characteristics, or "parameters" are each determined independently—was very influential in the years immediately following 1951 among composers such as Pierre Boulez, Karel Goeyvaerts, Luigi Nono and Karlheinz Stockhausen.^{citation needed} Stravinsky, who studied as a young man with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, became a primitivist, then a neoclassicist, and ultimately incorporated serialism into his compositional techniques following Schoenberg's death in 1951.^{citation needed}

Free dissonance and experimentalism

In the early part of the 20th century Charles Ives integrated American and European traditions as well as vernacular and church styles, while innovating in rhythm, harmony, and form (Burkholder 2001). Edgard Varèse wrote highly dissonant pieces that utilized unusual sonorities and futuristic, scientific sounding names.

Neoclassicism

Main Article: Neoclassicism (music)

Neoclassicism was born at the same time as the general return to rational models in the arts. Since economics also favored smaller ensembles, the search for doing "more with less" took on a practical imperative as well.^{citation needed}

Stravinsky's rival for a time in neo-classicism was the German Paul Hindemith, who mixed spiky dissonance, polyphony and free ranging chromaticism. He produced both chamber works and orchestral works in this style, including the opera "Mathis der Maler". His chamber output includes his Sonata for Horn, an expressionistic work filled with dark detail and internal connections.^{citation needed}

The school of Nadia Boulanger in Paris include Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Darius Milhaud, Ástor Piazzolla, Ned Rorem, and Virgil Thomson.^{citation needed}

Post-modernist music

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Birth of post-modernism

Post-modernism can be said to be a response to modernism, but it can also be viewed as a response to a deep-seated shift in societal attitude. According to this view, postmodernism began when historic (as opposed to personal) optimism turned to pessimism, at the latest by 1930 (Meyer 1994, 331).

John Cage is a prominent figure in 20th century music whose influence steadily grew during his lifetime. Interestingly, the seeming opposite of Cage's indeterminism is the completely determined music of the serialists, which both schools have noted produce similar sounding textures,^{citation needed} perhaps because many serialists, such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen have used aleatoric processes.^{citation needed} Michael Nyman argues that minimalism was a reaction to and made possible by both serialism and indeterminism (Nyman 1999, 139). (See also experimental music)

Minimalism

Main article: Minimalist music

Many composers in the later 20th century began to explore what is now called minimalism. The most specific definition of minimalism refers to the dominance of process in music — where fragments are layered on top of each other, often looped, to produce the entirety of the sonic canvas.^{citation needed} Early examples include Terry Riley's In C and Steve Reich's Drumming. Riley is seen by some as the "father" of minimalist music with In C, a work comprised of melodic cells that each performer in an ensemble plays through at their own rate.^{citation needed} One key difference between minimalism and previous music is the use of different cells being "out of phase" or determined by the performers^{citation needed}; contrast this with the opening of Das Rheingold by Richard Wagner which, despite its use of triadic cells, has each part controlled by the same impulse and moving at the same speed.

Electronic music

Main article: Electronic art music

Technological advances in the 20th century enabled composers to use electronic means of producing sound. The first electronic instrument was invented in The United States in 1897 by Thaddeus Cahill, and was called the telharmonium. Some composers simply incorporated electronic instruments into relatively conventional pieces. Olivier Messiaen, for example, used the ondes martenot in a number of works (though none of them could really be called "conventional").^{citation needed}

Other composers abandoned conventional instruments and used magnetic tape to create music, recording sounds and then manipulating them in some way. Pierre Schaeffer was the pioneer of such music, termed Musique concrète (acousmatic art). Some figures, such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, used purely electronic means to create their work.^{citation needed} In the United States of America, Milton Babbitt used the RCA Mark II Synthesizer to create music.^{citation needed} Sometimes such electronic music was combined with more conventional instruments, Stockhausen's Hymnen, Edgard Varèse's Déserts, and Mario Davidovsky's Synchronisms offer three examples.

Oskar Sala, created the non-musical soundtrack for Alfred Hitchcock's film The Birds, using the trautonium electronic instrument he helped develop.^{citation needed}

Iannis Xenakis is another modern composer who used computers and electronic instruments, including one he invented (called the UPIC), in many compositions.^{citation needed}

A number of institutions specialising in electronic music sprang up in the 20th century, with IRCAM in Paris perhaps the best known.^{citation needed}

Jazz-influenced classical composition

A number of composers combined elements of the jazz idiom with classical compositional styles, notably George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein.

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 phonograph in the early part of the century, and later with the inventions of the cassette and the compact disk, has lead to sheet music loosing is place as the principal means by which music is distributed^{citation needed}. In addition, broadcasting technologies, such as radio and television have meant that the concert hall is no longer the only means by which a performance can reach its audience.

Other

"New Complexity" is a current within today's European contemporary avant-garde music scene.^{citation needed} Some composers identified with this term are Brian Ferneyhough, James Dillon and Michael Finnissy. Another prominent development is the extension of instrumental technique and timbre, for instance in the music of Luigi Nono, Helmut Lachenmann and Salvatore Sciarrino.^{citation needed} Another notable movement is spectral music.^{citation needed} Prominent spectral composers include Tristan Murail and Gérard Grisey, and the 'post-spectral' composers Kaija Saariaho and Magnus Lindberg.

Notable 20th Century composers

References

Burkholder, J. Peter. 2001. "Ives, Charles (Edward)." The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. S. Sadie and J. Tyrrell. London: Macmillan.
Fauser, Annegret. 2005. Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World's Fair. Eastman Studies in Music 32. Rochester: University of Rochester Press. ISBN 978-1580461856
Meyer, Leonard B. 1994. Music, the Arts, and Ideas. 2d ed., with a new postlude. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226521435
Neighbour, O. W. 2001. "Schoenberg, Arnold". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. S. Sadie and J. Tyrrell, xxii, 577–604. London: Macmillan.
Nyman, Michael. 1999. Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. Music in the Twentieth Century. Second edition. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521653835
Salzman, Eric. 1988. Twentieth-Century Music: An Introduction, 4th edition. Prentice-Hall History of Music Series. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall. ISBN 0-13-935057-8
Schoenberg, Arnold. 1975. Style and Idea, edited by Leonard Stein with translations by Leo Black. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-05294-3.
Schwartz, Elliott, and Daniel Godfrey. 1993. Music Since 1945: Issues, Materials and Literature. New York: Schirmer Books; Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan Canada; New York: Maxwell Macmillan International. ISBN 0028730402

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