20 th Century

1. 20th Century Music History

2. 5 Main Currents • 1. Musical style that rely on national or regional idioms • 2. Incorporation of new Developments into musical styles rooted in the past • 3. Reaction to the post-Wagnerian romantic idiom that attempted to transform it. • 4. Return to audience-pleasing music fashioned from earlier styles • 5. Radical attempt at rejection of the Romantic past and its aesthetic.

3. MEDIA • Innovation and inventions of recording equipment, tv, CDs, publications of books, etc. has led to a very wide dissemination of music. • This has led to students of music from elementary to elderly have access to many different types of music. • The 20th century has seen the study of music become part of all liberal curriculums, from elementary to higher education.

4. HISTORICAL CONTENT • Events and developments in political, social, scientific, and cultural history have profoundly influenced the course of music history since 1900 • Two global wars in the first half of the century had powerful impacts on world history • Tremendous advances in science and engineering and their application to industry have affected social, economic, and cultural history

5. ARTS • Traits of the arts in the twentieth century are frequency and rapidity of change, experimentation with new forms and media, and mixed media • Some important trends and artists include expressionism(Kandinsky), cubism(Picasso), • Surrealism (Dali), dadaism (Duchamp), abstract expressionism (Pollack)

6. ARTS cont. • Literature, poetry, theater, and cinema have kept apace with the fine arts, social protest, existentialism, pessimism and despair, absurdity, intentional “shock value,” and ironic humor are some of the more pronounced traits

7. GENERAL DEVELOPMENTS IN 20TH CENTURY MUSIC • A number of general stylistic trends are evident in art music since 1900. they do not form a neat chronological sequence: rather they are overlapping developments • They are neither distinctly nor consistently separate developments • More than one trend is often synthesized in the individual style of a single composer

8. ROMANTICISM • While radical innovations were emerging in the early decades, romantic currents remained dominant. • SUBJECTIVITY, EMOTIONALISM, PROGRAMMATIC BASES, AND LARGE ORCHESTRAS were some of the traits that persisted even in compositions that employed new harmonies, rhythms, timbres, and tonalities.

9. ROMANTICISM AND NATIONALISM • An alliance was forged in the 19th century between Romantic and nationalist musics • In the generations since, nationalism has waned somewhat, concurrently with Romanticism. Composers of Romantic inclination became more eclectic and borrowed freely from the music of other nationalities and regions

10. NEW ROMANTICISM • This movement dates from the 1960’s, when some composers turned away from the prevailing highly complex, esoteric language of the avant-garde and embraced aspects of 19th century music • Some composers are quite literal in their borrowings, while others use only details of the Romantic style

11. IMPRESSIONISM • The 1st important trend toward 20th century modernism in music was Impressionism • In the hands of Claude Debussy (1862-1918), it paralleled movements in French painting, sculpture, and poetry • Largely a reaction against German Romanticism, it developed new styles and techniques

12. IMPRESIONISM cont. • Although impressionistic music was romantically subjective and programmatic, it departed from 19th century practices in several ways • It generally demonstrated a high degree of refinement, delicacy, subtlety of form, and luminosity: 1. Neomodality (return to use of church modes 2. Open chords (5ths and Octaves without 3rds) 3. Parallelism 4. Whole tone mode (6 whole steps to the octave) 5. free rhythms and less prominence of bar-line regularity & 6 Wide spacing and extreme registers, especially in piano music

13. EXPRESSIONISM • This was as significant movement as Impressionism • Covering the period from 1910-1930, it sought to express the innermost feelings of the subconscious, the psychological of which was being studied at that time by Freud • The style is harshly dissonant and often without a stable sense of a tonal center • 3 names of composers closely identified with Expressionism are Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern

14. NEOCLASSICISM • Was an extensive and pervasive trend lasting from about 1920-1950 • In a a general sense it implied a return to earlier ideals of objectivity, balance, clarity of texture, and absolute music, but it was not confined just to 18thcentury Classicism • Also involved the revival of contrapuntal textures and forms from the Renaissance and Baroque while employing 20th century harmonies, rhythms, melodies, and timbres • Most important composer was Igor Stravinsky • Others were Sergei Prokofiev and Paul Hindemith

15. AVANT-GARDE • The most important new musical development of the last half of the twentieth century • Composers are Charles Ives, Erik Satie, Henry Cowell and Edgar Varese • The avant-garde is less a unified style than any of the trends mentioned above, and more a movement • At its most radical, it rejects fundamental premises on which art music has traditionally been based • It might 1) be without melody in any traditional sense; 2)not use harmonies in ways explainable by the tonal systems 3) have no readily discernible meter: 4)eschew traditional forms and structures; and 5) be performed by newly created instruments or by historical ones played in new ways

16. Specific Styles and Techniques • In general, rhythm plays a much more prominent role in 20th century music, where it has greater vitality, complexity, variety, and flexibility than in the previous music history periods • New time signatures, asymmetrical grouping, nonmetric music, polymetric music multimetric music, displaced bar line, polyrhythmic music • Jazz and popular music have been primary influences in this development of new rhythmic devices

17. Melody • Departures from common practice period melodic concepts involve developments in 3 areas: 1)melodic style, 2) new mode bases, and 3) the role of melody in the total musical context • STYLE • More extreme melodic styles feature disjunct progressions (wide leaps from one note to the next), angularity(alternating upward and downward direction), dissonant skips, and fragmentation(small groups of notes separated by rests and widely separated registers

18. Role of Melody • Until the 20th century, melody was consistently a dominant element in music • By midcentury its role was variable • It retains its supremacy in contrapuntal textures, but it is usually subordinate in music in which rhythm, and harmony, and timbre are the prominent elements • In some of these cases, pitch itself is not important, hence making melody, in any conventional sense, impossible

19. Harmony • No element of music has been treated more radically by the 20th century than harmony • New harmonic concepts involve 4 aspects: 1) chord construction; 2) chord progression; 3) dissonance; and, in extreme instances, 4) elimination of harmony altogether • TONALITY • Began to show signs of weakening during the 19th century. Chromatic harmony and prolonged modulations increasingly obscured the tonal center as composers stretched the bonds of the system. 20th century has departed still further from conventional tonal concepts, ultimately eliminating tonality altogether

20. Styles and Techniques of the Avant-Garde • Important groups have been interested in breaking with past traditions. • A. 12-tone music –serial manipulation of the 12 chromatic pitches • B. Serialism-pitches of the tone row and its derivations are treated recurrently in series. Used for rhythms as well. • C. Composers have since expanded elements eligible for serialization to include dynamics, timbre, densities, sonorities, forms. In total serialization all elements are serialized

21. Aleatory Music • John Cage is the most important composer of this style of music. His “Music of Changes” was a forty-three minute work for piano in which every note and aspect of the music was determined by coin tosses • ELECTRONIC MUSIC- tape music, analog-synthesizer and digital-synthesizer • IMPROVISATION- is more a force in the 20th century than in any period since the Middle Ages • MINIMALISM- is created from limited materials. Melodies may be extremely simple, harmonies uncomplicated and static. The overriding characteristic is repetition.

22. Musical Media • The distinctive sounds of 20th century music are due in large part to developments in media, some of which represent radical innovations • CONVENTIONAL MEDIA • Orchestral music, chamber music, concert band, choral music, piano music, art song, opera, ballet and modern dance

23. COMPOSERS • This is a partial list because there are so many that have contributed to this period of great change • Charles Ives, Virgil Thomson, George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, Leonard Bernstein, John Phillip Sousa, Edgar Varese, John Cage, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich, Claude Debussy, Erik Satie, Maurice Ravel, Darius Milhaud, Pierre Boulez, Austrian three-Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern, Paul Hindemith, Ottorino Respighi, Britain’s Ralph Vaughan Williams, William Walton, Benjamin Britten, Edward Elgar, Hungary’s Bela Bartok, and Zoltan Kodaly, (pedagogic method of teaching music to children)