20th century classical music

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20th century classical music begins with the late Romantic style of Sergei Rachmaninoff, Impressionism of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, American Vernacular music of Charles Ives and George Gershwin, and continues through the Neoclassicism of middle-period Igor Stravinsky, the twelve-tone music of Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern. It ranges to such distant sound-worlds as the total serialism of Pierre Boulez, the simple harmonies and rhythms of minimalist composers such as Steve Reich, and Philip Glass, the musique concrète of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, the microtonal music written by Easley Blackwood, Alois Hába, Ben Johnston, Harry Partch, and others, the aleatoric music of John Cage, the Intuitive music of Karlheinz Stockhausen, and the polystylism of Alfred Schnittke.

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, which followed the common practice period, which emphasized consonance. The watershed transitional moment was the international Paris Exposition celebrating the centennial of the French Revolution. This exposition brought a variety of non-Western performing artists to Paris, influencing Debussy and Mahler in particular. 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 (Schwartz and Godfrey 1993, 9–43), others hold that the Schoenberg work is squarely within the late-Romantic tradition of Wagner and Brahms (Neighbour 2001, 582).

Among the most prominent composers of the twentieth century were Béla Bartók, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Giacomo Puccini, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Charles Ives, Edward Elgar, Frederick Delius, Arnold Schoenberg, Jean Sibelius, Elliott Carter, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Sergei Prokofiev, Gabriel Fauré, Alberto Ginastera, Gian-Carlo Menotti, Igor Stravinsky, Dmitri Shostakovich, Alban Berg, Manuel de Falla, Peter Maxwell Davies, Ottorino Respighi, John Cage, Benjamin Britten, Anton Webern, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Aaron Copland, Carl Nielsen, Paul Hindemith, György Ligeti, Olivier Messiaen, Kurt Weill, Milton Babbitt, Samuel Barber, Luciano Berio, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Henri Dutilleux and Witold Lutosławski. Classical music also had a significant cross fertilization with jazz, with several composers being able to work in both genres, including George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein.

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 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.

The twentieth century was also an age where recording and broadcast changed the economics and social relationships inherent in music. An individual in the 19th century made most music themselves, or attended performances. An individual in the industrialized world had access to radio, television, phonograph and later digital music such as the CD.

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, 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 Dmitri Kabalevsky, 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. Some other twentieth-century composers of works in a more-or-less-traditional idiom include:

Minimalist composers such as Philip Glass have also been said 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 took more experimental routes.

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

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), but he later abandoned a tonal framework altogether, instead writing freely atonal music. In time, he developed the twelve-tone technique of composition.

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. In Europe, the "punctual", "pointist", or "pointillist" style of Messiaen's "Mode de valeurs et d'intensités", widely viewed at the time 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. 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.

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.

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.

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

Post-modernist music

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, perhaps because many serialists, such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen have used aleatoric processes. 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. 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. One key difference between minimalism and previous music is the use of different cells being "out of phase" or determined by the performers; 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 Russia in 1919 by Leon Theremin, and was called the theremin. 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").

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. In the United States of America, Milton Babbitt used the RCA Mark II Synthesizer to create music. 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.

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

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

Jazz-influenced classical composition

A number of composers combined elements of the jazz idiom with classical compositional styles. Notable examples include:

Jazz-influenced compositions (Alphabetical by last name)
George Antheil	Jazz Symphony	1925
Malcolm Arnold	Concerto for Harmonica and Orchestra, op. 46 Concerto for Guitar and Orchestra, op. 67 Concerto No. 2 for Clarinet and Orchestra, op. 115	1954 1959 1974
Milton Babbitt	All Set	1957
Leonard Bernstein	Sonata for Clarinet and Piano Prelude, Fugue, and Riffs Serenade for violin, strings, harp, and percussion, after Plato: Symposium	1941–42 1949 1954
Boris Blacher	Concerto for Jazz Orchestra Die Gesänge des Seeräubers O'Rourke und seiner Geliebten Sally Brown, beide auf das Felseneiland En Vano Anhelar verschlagen, op. 56 Plus Minus One for string quartet and jazz ensemble Blues, Espagnola und Rumba philharmonica for 12 cellos Stars and Strings, for jazz ensemble and string orchestra	1946 1958 1966 1972 1972
Marc Blitzstein	The Cradle Will Rock Regina	1936–37 1946–48
Aaron Copland	Three Moods for piano Concerto for Piano and Orchestra Danzón Cubano Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra Something Wild, film score	1920–21 1926 1946 1947–48 1961
George Gershwin	Rhapsody in Blue An American in Paris Porgy and Bess	1924 1928 1935
Hans Werner Henze	Boulevard Solitude Undine Versuch über Schweine	1951 1956–57 1968
Paul Hindemith	1922 Suite für Klavier	1922
Arthur Honegger	Concertino for piano and orchestra	1924
Ernst Krenek	Jonny spielt auf	1926
Constant Lambert	Elegiac Blues Concerto for Piano and Nine Players	1927 1930–31
Rolf Liebermann	Concerto for Jazzband and Symphony Orchestra	1954
Darius Milhaud	Caramel Mou, op.68, for piano Trois rag caprices, op.78, for piano La Création du Monde''	1920 1922 1923
Maurice Ravel	[[Sonata [no. 2] for Violin and Piano]] Piano Concerto in G	1923–27 1929–1931
Gunther Schuller	Concertino for Jazz Quartet and Orchestra	1959
Elie Siegmeister	Clarinet Concerto	1956
Karlheinz Stockhausen	Kreuzspiel Mikrophonie II Tierkreis Luzifers Tanz	1951 1965 1974–75 1983
Igor Stravinsky	Ragtime for 11 instruments L'Histoire du Soldat Piano-Rag Music Praeludium Scherzo a la russe Ebony Concerto	1917–18 1918 1919 1936–37/53 1944 1945
Kurt Weill	Threepenny Opera	1928

Other

"New Complexity" is a current within today's European contemporary avant-garde music scene. 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. Another notable movement is spectral music. Prominent spectral composers include Tristan Murail and Gérard Grisey, and the 'post-spectral' composers Kaija Saariaho and Magnus Lindberg.

References

Burkholder, J. Peter. 2001. "Ives, Charles (Edward)." The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. S. Sadie and J. Tyrrell. London: Macmillan.
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
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