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Español20TH CENTURY CLASSICAL MUSIC
'20th century classical music', the classical music of the 20th century, was extremely diverse, beginning with the late Romantic style of Sergei Rachmaninoff, Impressionism of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, and continuing through the Neoclassicism of middle-period Igor Stravinsky, the twelve-tone music of Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern, and ranging 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 common thread during this time period of classical music was the wider use of dissonance in composing music. Because of this, the 20th century is sometimes called the "Dissonant Period" of classical music, which followed the common practice period, which emphasized consonance until 1889, which was a pivotal year in Europe: the year of the great international Paris Exposition celebrating the centennial of the French Revolution, for which the Eiffel Tower was built. 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 20th 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, Peter Sculthorpe, Edgard Varèse, Igor Stravinsky, Dmitri Shostakovich, Alban Berg, Manuel de Falla, Henri Pousseur, Peter Maxwell Davies, Silvestre Revueltas, Luigi Dallapiccola, Hanns Eisler, Ottorino Respighi, John Cage, Benjamin Britten, Anton Webern, Carlos Chávez, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Aaron Copland, Carl Nielsen, Luigi Nono, Harrison Birtwistle, Paul Hindemith, George Enescu, György Ligeti, Olivier Messiaen, Toru Takemitsu, Kurt Weill, Milton Babbitt, Samuel Barber, William Walton, Luciano Berio, Arvo Pärt, Pierre Boulez, Henri Dutilleux, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Witold Lutosławski, and Iannis Xenakis. Classical music also had an intense cross fertilization with jazz, with several composers being able to work in both genres, including George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein. An important feature of 20th century concert music is the existence of 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, 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 20th 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 20th 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 19th 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 19th century.
Music along these lines was written throughout the 20th century, and continues to be written today. Some other twentieth-century composers of works in a more-or-less-traditional idiom include:
★ Samuel Barber
★ Leonard Bernstein
★ Aaron Copland
★ John Corigliano
★ George Gershwin
★ Henryk Górecki
★ Percy Grainger
★ Howard Hanson
★ Roy Harris
★ Gustav Holst
★ Alan Hovhaness
★ Aram Khachaturian
★ Colin McPhee
★ Nikolai Medtner
★ Carl Nielsen
★ Giacomo Puccini
★ Sergei Rachmaninoff
★ Joaquín Rodrigo
★ Ned Rorem
★ Jean Sibelius
★ Elie Siegmeister
★ Ralph Vaughan Williams
★ Heitor Villa-Lobos
★ William Walton
Minimalist composers such as Philip Glass have also be 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 20th century composers took more experimental routes.
Modernism
''Main article:'' Modernism (music)
Modernism is the name given to a trend of thought in music and other art media (See Modernism) arising out of the idea that the 20th century presented a new basis for society and activity, and therefore art should adopt this new basis, however construed, as the fundamental of aesthetics. Modernism took the progressive spirit of the late 19th century, its love of rigor and of technical advancement, and unhinged it from the norms and forms of late 19th century art. Various movements in 20th century music, including neo-classicism, serialism, experimentalism, minimalism, and conceptualism can be traced to this idea.
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, intended to be a replacement for traditional tonal pitch organisation. His pupils Anton Webern and Alban Berg also developed and furthered the use of the twelve-tone system and were notable for their use of the technique in their own right. They together are known, colloquially, as the Schoenberg "trinity" or the Second Viennese School. This name was created to imply that this "New Music" would have the same effect as the "First Viennese School" of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.
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. Milton Babbitt created his time-point system, where the distance in time between attack points for the notes is serialized also, while some composers serialized aspects such as register or dynamics. 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 modernist composers such as George Antheil and others produced music that was shocking to audiences of the time for its disregard or flaunting of musical conventions. Charles Ives integrated American and European traditions as well as vernacular and church styles, while innovating in rhythm, harmony, and form (Burkholder 2001). Henry Cowell performed his solo piano pieces by strumming or plucking the inside of the piano, knocking on the outside, or depressing tone clusters with his arms or boards. Edgard Varèse wrote highly dissonant pieces that utilized unusual sonorities and futuristic, scientific sounding names; he also dreamed of producing music electronically. Charles Seeger enunciated the concept of dissonant counterpoint, a technique used by Carl Ruggles, Ruth Crawford-Seeger, and others. Igor Stravinsky and Serge Diaghilev fled the riot that greeted ''The Rite of Spring'' and Vaslav Nijinsky's choreography. Darius Milhaud and Paul Hindemith explored bitonality. Amadeo Roldán brought music written specifically for percussion ensemble into the classical tradition; he was soon followed by Varèse and then others. Kurt Weill wrote the popular Threepenny Opera entirely in the popular idiom of German cabarets. Modernist composers being the avant-garde, they often wrote atonally, sometimes explored twelve tone technique, used liberal amounts of dissonance, quoted or imitated popular music, or somehow provoked their audience.
Neoclassicism
''Main Article:'' Neoclassicism (music)
Neo-classicism, in music, means the movement in the 20th century to return to a revived "common practice" harmony, mixed with greater dissonance and rhythm, as the basic point of departure for music. Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, Paul Hindemith, Sergei Prokofiev and Béla Bartók are usually listed as the most important composers in this mode, but also the prolific Darius Milhaud and his contemporary Francis Poulenc.
Neo-classicism was born at the same time as the general return to rational models in the arts in response to World War I. Smaller, more spare, more orderly was conceived of as the response to the overwrought emotionalism which many felt had herded people into the trenches. Since economics also favored smaller ensembles, the search for doing "more with less" took on a practical imperative as well. Stravinsky's ''L'Histoire du Soldat'' is thought of as a seminal "neo-classical piece", as are his ''Dumbarton Oaks'' Concerto and his "Symphonies of Wind Instruments", as well as his ''Symphony in C''. Stravinsky's neo-classicism culminated with his opera ''Rake's Progress'', to a libretto by the well-known modernist poet, W. H. Auden.
Stravinsky's rival for a time in neo-classicism was the German Paul Hindemith, who mixed spiky dissonance, polyphony and free ranging chromaticism into a style which was "useful". He produced both chamber works and orchestral works in this style, perhaps most famously "Mathis der Maler". His chamber output includes his Sonata for French Horn, an expressionistic work filled with dark detail and internal connections.
Neo-classicism found a welcome audience in America. The school of Nadia Boulanger in Paris promulgated ideas about music based on her understanding of Stravinsky's music. Her students include Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Darius Milhaud, Ástor Piazzolla, Ned Rorem, and Virgil Thomson.
Neo-classicism's most audible traits are melodies which use the tritone as a stable interval, and coloristically add dissonant notes to ostinato and block harmonies, along with the free mixture of polyrhythms. Neo-classicism won greater audience acceptance more quickly, and was taken to heart by those opposed to atonality as the true "modern" music. Neo-classicism also embraced the use of folk musics to give greater rhythmic and harmonic variety. Modernists such as the Hungarians Béla Bartók and Romantically inclined Zoltán Kodály and the Czech Leoš Janáček collected and studied their native folk musics which then influenced their compositions.
Post-modernist music
Post-modernism's birth
Post-modernism can be said to be a response to modernism which asserts that the products of human activity — particularly manufactured or created by artifice — are the central subject for art itself, and that the purpose of art is to focus people's attention on objects for contemplation, as composer-critic Steve Hicken explained it. This strain of modernism looks backward to the dada school of art exemplified by Duchamp, and to the collage of "concrete" music, as well as experiments with electronic music by Edgard Varèse and others. However, post-modernism asserted that this was the primary mode of human existence, an individual aswim in a sea of the products of people.
John Cage is a prominent figure in 20th century music whose influence steadily grew during his lifetime, and who is regarded by many as the founder of post-modernist music. Cage questioned the very definition of music in his pieces, and stressed a philosophy that ''all'' sounds are essentially music. Cage in the "silent" ''4'33"'' presents the listener with his idea that the unintentional sounds are just as musically valid as the sounds originating from an instrument. Cage also notably used aleatoric music, and "found sounds" in order to create an interesting and different type of music. His music not only rested on his argument that there was no "music" or "noise" only "sound", and that combinations of found sound were musical events as well - but on the importance of focusing of attention and "framing" as essential to art. (See Post-Modernism)
Cage, though, has been seen by some to be too avant-garde in his approach; for this reason, many find his music unappealing. Interestingly, the seeming opposite of Cage's indeterminism is the overdetermined music of the serialists, which both schools have noted produce similar sounding pieces, yet many serialists, such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen have used aleatoric processes. Michael Nyman argues in ''Experimental Music'' that minimalism was a reaction to and made possible by both serialism and indeterminism. (See also experimental music)
Post-modernism reached music and painting at very similar moments, on one hand, the spareness, purity, love of mechanism, abstraction and the grid which are very modernist traits were preserved, as was the emphasis on personalizing style and experimentalism. However, post-modernism rejected the hermeneutic stance—the need to be "in" on the joke as it were—of modernism. Instead post-modernism took the popular and pared down as its aesthetic guide. One of the first movements to overtly break with the modernist took inspiration from Cage's work, and its emphasis on layering sounds: Minimalism.
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. The minimalist wave of composers—Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and La Monte Young to name the most prominent—wanted music to be "accessible" to ordinary listeners, and wanted to express concrete specific questions of dramatic and music form, not hidden in layers of technique, but very overtly. 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.
Minimalist music is often contentious amongst traditional listeners. Its critics find it to be overly repetitive and empty while proponents argue that the static elements that are often prevalent draw more interest to small changes. Minimalism has, however, inspired and influenced many composers not usually labeled "minimalist" such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and György Ligeti. Composers such as Arvo Pärt, John Tavener, and Henryk Górecki, whose ''Symphony No. 3'' was the highest selling classical album of the 1990s, have found great success with what has been called "Holy Minimalism" in their deeply felt religious works.
The next wave of composers working in this tradition are not called "Minimalist" by some, but are by others. These include opera composer John Adams and his student Aaron Jay Kernis. The expansion of minimalism from process music, to music which relies on texture to hold together the movement of the music has created a wider diversity of compositions and composers.
The influences of minimalists such as Steve Reich (in particular ''Drumming'') are clear in much of the work of DJ Spooky showing a perfect example of the crossover between 20th century classical, and electronic music such as trip-hop and even trance and drum n bass.
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.
Some well-known electronic works generally regarded as in the classical tradition include "Film Music" by Vladimir Ussachevsky, ''A Rainbow in Curved Air'' and ''Shri Camel'' by Terry Riley, "Silver Apples of the Moon", "The Wild Bull", and "Return" by Morton Subotnick, ''Sonic Seasonings'' and ''Switched-On Bach'' by Wendy Carlos, "Light Over Water" by John Adams, ''Aqua'' by Edgar Froese, and ''Poème électronique'' by Edgar Varèse.
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:
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.
See also
★ List of 20th century classical composers
★ Contemporary music
★ Acousmatic art
References
★ Burkholder, J. Peter. 2001. "Ives, Charles (Edward)." ''The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians'', ed. S. Sadie and J. Tyrrell. London: Macmillan.
★ 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.
★ Schwartz, Eliott, and D. Godfrey. 1993. ''Music Since 1945: Issues, Materials and Literature''. Belmont, CA: Simon & Schuster Macmillan.
External links
★ 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
★ Música y filosofía contemporánea; Registros polifónicos de John Cage a Peter Sloterdijk | Dr. Adolfo Vasquez Rocca
Publishers
★ G. Schirmer, Inc.
★ Boosey&Hawkes Music Publishers
★ Schott Music International
★ 4´33" Vierdreiunddreißig München Musikverlag
★ Atopos Foundation for Contemporary Classical Music
Further reading
★ Teachout, Terry. ''Masterpieces of the Century: A Finale - 20th century classical music'', Commentary Magazine, Volume: 107 Issue: 6 Page: 55
★ Lee, Douglas. ''Masterworks of 20th-Century Music: The Modern Repertory of the Symphony Orchestra'', Routledge; 1 edition. ISBN 0415938473, ISBN 978-0415938471
★ Roberts, Paul. ''Claude Debussy - 20th Century Composers'', Phaidon Press. ISBN 0714835129, ISBN 978-0714835129
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