20th-century classical music
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20th-century classical music is art music that was written between the years 1901 and 2000, inclusive. Musical style diverged during the 20th century as it never had previously, so this century was without a dominant style.
History
At the turn of the century, music was characteristically late
Many composers reacted to the Post-Romantic and Impressionist styles and moved in quite different directions. The single most important moment in defining the course of music throughout the century was the widespread break with traditional tonality, effected in diverse ways by different composers in the first decade of the century. From this sprang an unprecedented "linguistic plurality" of styles, techniques, and expression.[2] 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 Pierre Boulez) developed it further still.[3] 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.[4]
After the First World War, many composers started returning to the past for inspiration and wrote works that draw elements (form, harmony, melody, structure) from it. This type of music thus became labelled neoclassicism. Igor Stravinsky (Pulcinella), Sergei Prokofiev (Classical Symphony), Ravel (Le Tombeau de Couperin), Manuel de Falla (El retablo de maese Pedro) and Paul Hindemith (Symphony: Mathis der Maler) all produced neoclassical works.
Italian composers such as
In the 1940s and 50s composers, notably
From the early 1950s onwards, Cage introduced elements of chance into his music. 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.[vague] The term experimental music was coined by Cage to describe works that produce unpredictable results,[7] according to the definition "an experimental action is one the outcome of which is not foreseen".[8] 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.[9][page needed] Other composers, such as Benjamin Britten (War Requiem), explored political themes in their works, albeit entirely at their own volition.[10] 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' Five Variants of 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 last quarter of the century,
Styles
Romantic style
At the end of the 19th century (often called the
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 Schoenberg's work is squarely within the late-Romantic tradition of Wagner and Brahms[11] and, more generally, that "the composer who most directly and completely connects late Wagner and the 20th century is Arnold Schoenberg".[12]
Neoclassicism
Neoclassicism was a style cultivated between the two world wars, which sought to revive the balanced forms and clearly perceptible thematic processes of the 17th and 18th centuries, in a repudiation of what were seen as exaggerated gestures and formlessness of late Romanticism. Because these composers generally replaced the functional tonality of their models with extended tonality, modality, or atonality, the term is often taken to imply parody or distortion of the Baroque or Classical style.
Jazz-influenced classical composition
A number of composers combined elements of the jazz idiom with classical compositional styles, notably:
- Malcolm Arnold
- Leonard Bernstein
- Marc Blitzstein
- Aaron Copland
- George Gershwin
- Nikolai Kapustin
- Constant Lambert
- Darius Milhaud
- Maurice Ravel
- Gunther Schuller (third stream)
- John Serry Sr.
- Dmitri Shostakovich
- Karlheinz Stockhausen
- Igor Stravinsky
Movements
Impressionism
Impressionism started in France as a reaction, led by Claude Debussy, 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".[14]
Other composers associated with impressionism include
Modernism
Futurism
At its conception, Futurism was an Italian artistic movement founded in 1909 by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti; 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.[17] 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.
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 using innovative techniques in his rhythm, harmony, and form.[19] His technique included the use of polytonality, polyrhythm, tone clusters, aleatoric elements, and quarter tones. 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).
Expressionism
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.[20]
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.[21]
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.[22] His influence steadily grew during his lifetime. 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. Currently, postmodernism includes composers who react against the avant-garde and experimental styles of the late 20th century such as Astor Piazzolla, Argentina, and Miguel del Águila, USA.
Minimalism
In the later 20th century, composers such as La Monte Young, Arvo Pärt, 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
Philip Glass's 1 + 1 (1968) employs the additive process in which short phrases are slowly expanded. La Monte Young's Compositions 1960 employs 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.[24] (See also experimental music.)
Techniques
Atonality and twelve-tone technique
Arnold Schoenberg is one of the most significant figures in 20th-century music. While his early works were in a late Romantic style influenced by Wagner (Verklärte Nacht, 1899), this evolved into an atonal idiom in the years before the First World War (Drei Klavierstücke in 1909 and Pierrot lunaire in 1912). 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.[25] His first large-scale work entirely composed using this technique was the Wind Quintet, Op. 26, written in 1923–24. Later examples include the Variations for Orchestra, Op. 31 (1926–28), the Third and Fourth String Quartets (1927 and 1936, respectively), the Violin Concerto (1936) and Piano Concerto (1942). In later years, he intermittently returned to a more tonal style (Kammersymphonie no. 2, begun in 1906 but completed only in 1939; Variations on a Recitative for organ in 1941).
He taught
Electronic music
The development of recording technology made all sounds available for potential use as musical material. Electronic music generally refers to a repertory of art music developed in the 1950s in Europe, Japan, and the Americas. The increasing availability of magnetic tape in this decade provided composers with a medium which allowed recording sounds and then manipulating them in various ways. All electronic music depends on transmission via loudspeakers, but there are two broad types: acousmatic music, which exists only in recorded form meant for loudspeaker listening, and live electronic music, in which electronic apparatus are used to generate, transform, or trigger sounds during performance by musicians using voices, traditional instruments, electro-acoustic instruments, or other devices. Beginning in 1957, computers became increasingly important in this field.[26] 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, Edgard Varèse's Déserts (1954), Stockhausen's Hymnen (1969), Claude Vivier's Wo bist du Licht! (1981), and Mario Davidovsky's series of Synchronisms (1963–2006) are notable examples.
Other notable 20th-century composers
Some prominent 20th-century composers are not associated with any widely recognised school of composition. The list below includes some of those, as well as notable classifiable composers not mentioned earlier in this article:
- Samuel Adler
- Louis Andriessen
- Béla Bartók
- Havergal Brian
- Elliott Carter
- Carlos Chávez
- Edward Elgar
- George Enescu
- Gabriel Fauré
- Morton Feldman
- Brian Ferneyhough
- Alberto Ginastera
- Henryk Górecki
- Sofia Gubaidulina
- Alan Hovhaness
- György Ligeti
- Witold Lutosławski
- Bruno Maderna
- Bohuslav Martinů
- Carl Nielsen
- Krzysztof Penderecki
- Francis Poulenc
- Giacomo Puccini
- Sergei Rachmaninoff
- Alfred Schnittke
- Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji
- Patric Standford
- Mikis Theodorakis
- Michael Tippett
- Joan Tower
- Ralph Vaughan Williams
- Heitor Villa-Lobos
- William Walton
- Judith Weir
- Iannis Xenakis
See also
References
Citations
- ^ Politoske and Martin 1988, p. 419.
- ^ Morgan 1984, p. 458.
- ^ Ross 2008, pp. 194–196, 363–364.
- ^ Ross 2008, p. 296.
- ^ Dack 2002.
- ^ Dufourt 1981; Dufourt 1991
- ^ Mauceri 1997, p. 197.
- ^ Cage 1961, p. 39.
- ^ McBurney 2004.
- ^ Evans 1979, p. 450.
- ^ Neighbour 2001, p. 582.
- ^ Salzman 1988, p. 10.
- ^ Whittall 2001.
- ^ Machlis 1979, pp. 86–87.
- ^ Machlis 1979, pp. 115–118.
- ^ Pasler 2001a.
- ^ Russolo 1913.
- ^ Dennis and Powell 2001.
- ^ Burkholder 2001.
- ^ Fanning 2001.
- ^ Meyer 1994, p. 331.
- ^ Williams 2002, p. 241.
- ^ Reich 2011.
- ^ Nyman 1999, p. 139.
- ^ Schoenberg 1975, p. 213.
- ^ Emmerson and Smalley 2001.
Sources
- Burkholder, J. Peter. 2001. "Ives, Charles (Edward)." The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan.
- ISBN 99911-780-1-5[In particular the essays "Experimental Music", pp. 7–12, and "Experimental Music: Doctrine", pp. 13–17.]
- Dack, John. 2002. "Technology and the Instrument". In musik netz werke—Konturen der neuen Musikkultur, edited by Lydia Grün and Frank Wiegand, 39–54. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. ISBN 3-933127-98-X.
- Dennis, Flora, and Jonathan Powell. 2001. "Futurism". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan.
- Dufourt, Hugues. 1981. "Musique spectrale: pour une pratique des formes de l'énergie". Bicéphale, no. 3:85–89.
- Dufourt, Hugues. 1991. Musique, pouvoir, écriture. Collection Musique/Passé/Présent. Paris: Christian Bourgois. ISBN 2-267-01023-2.
- Emmerson, Simon, and Denis Smalley. 2001. "Electro-Acoustic Music". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan.
- Evans, Peter. 1979. The Music of Benjamin Britten. London: Dent.
- Fanning, David. 2001. "Expressionism". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan.
- ISBN 0-691-12068-4, 0-691-12069-2.
- Machlis, Joseph. 1979. Introduction to Contemporary Music, 2nd edition. New York: W. W. Norton. ISBN 0-393-09026-4.
- Mauceri, Frank X. 1997. "From Experimental Music to Musical Experiment". Perspectives of New Music 35, no. 1 (Winter): 187–204.
- ISBN 0-226-52143-5.
- Morgan, Robert P. 1984. "Secret Languages: The Roots of Musical Modernism". Critical Inquiry 10, no. 3 (March): 442–461.
- Neighbour, O. W. 2001. "Schoenberg, Arnold". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell, 22:577–604. London: Macmillan.
- ISBN 0-521-65383-5.
- Pasler, Jann. 2001a. "Impressionism". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan; New York: Grove's Dictionaries of Music.
- Politoske, Daniel T., and Werner Martin. 1988. Music, 4th edition. Prentice Hall. ISBN 0-13-607616-5.
- ISBN 978-0-19-515115-2.
- ISBN 978-0-312-42771-9.
- ISBN 0-918728-57-6.
- ISBN 0-13-935057-8.
- ISBN 0-520-05294-3.
- Whittall, Arnold. 2001. "Neo-classicism", The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan.
- Williams, Alastair. 2002. "Cage and Postmodernism". ISBN 0-521-78968-0(pbk).
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 978-1-58046-143-6.
- Crawford, John C., and Dorothy L. Crawford. 1993. Expressionism in Twentieth-Century Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ISBN 0-253-31473-9
- Fauser, Annegret. 2005. Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World's Fair. Eastman Studies in Music 32. Rochester: University of Rochester Press. ISBN 978-1-58046-185-6.
- Heyman, Barbara B. 2001. "Barber, Samuel." The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan.
- Grun, Constantin. 2006. Arnold Schönberg und Richard Wagner: Spuren einer aussergewöhnlichen Beziehung, 2 volumes. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Unipress. 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 978-0-415-93847-1
- Pasler, Jann. 2001b. "Neo-romantic". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan.
- Roberts, Paul. 2008. Claude Debussy. 20th-Century Composers. London and New York: Phaidon Press. ISBN 978-0-7148-3512-9
- ISBN 0-13-095941-3
- ISBN 0-02-873040-2.
- Simms, Bryan R. 1996. Music of the Twentieth Century: Style and Structure, 2nd edition. New York: Schirmer; London: Prentice Hall International. ISBN 0-02-872392-9
- Teachout, Terry. 1999. "Masterpieces of the Century: A Finale-20th Century Classical Music". Commentary 107, no. 6 (June): 55.
- ISBN 0-415-93795-7.
- Watanabe, Ruth T., and James Perone. 2001. "Hanson, Howard." The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan.
- Wright, Simon. 1992.[verification needed] "Villa-Lobos, Heitor". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan.
External links
- Fluid Radio, Experimental Frequencies
- The Avant Garde Project, free downloads of out of print avant garde music
- Ircam Paris (in French)
- 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) Archived 2019-08-13 at the Wayback Machine
- temp’óra – international network dedicated to the promotion of contemporary music. Data bases with thousands of links all over the world.
- Culture is Fun! Exploring Classical Music