20th-century

classical music

20th-century classical music describes art

music that was written nominally from
1901 to 2000, inclusive. Musical style
diverged during the 20th century as it
never had previously. Consequently, this
century was without a dominant style.
Modernism, impressionism, and post-
romanticism can all be traced to the
decades before the turn of the century, but
can be included because they evolved
beyond the musical boundaries of the
19th-century styles that were part of the
earlier common practice period.
Neoclassicism and expressionism came
mostly after 1900. Minimalism started
much later in the century and can be seen
as a change from the modern to post-
modern era, although some date post-
modernism from as early as c. 1930.
Aleatory, atonality, serialism, musique
concrète, electronic music, and concept
music were all developed during this
century. Jazz and ethnic folk music
became important influences on many
composers during this century.
History
At the turn of the century, music was
characteristically late Romantic in style.
Composers such as Gustav Mahler,
Richard Strauss and Jean Sibelius were
pushing the bounds of post-Romantic
symphonic writing. At the same time, the
Impressionist movement, spearheaded by
Claude Debussy, was being developed in
France. Debussy in fact loathed the term
Impressionism: "I am trying to do
'something different—in a way realities—
what the imbeciles call 'impressionism' is
a term which is as poorly used as possible,
particularly by art critics" (Politoske and
Martin 1988, 419). Maurice Ravel's music,
also often labelled as impressionist,
explores music in many styles not always
related to it (see the discussion on
Neoclassicism, below).

Arnold Schoenberg, Los Angeles, 1948

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
(Morgan 1984, 458). 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 (Ross 2008, 194–96 and 363–
64). 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 (Ross
2008, 296).
Igor Stravinsky

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 Francesco

Balilla Pratella and Luigi Russolo
developed musical Futurism. This style
often tried to recreate everyday sounds
and place them in a "Futurist" context. The
"Machine Music" of George Antheil
(starting with his Second Sonata, "The
Airplane") and Alexander Mosolov (most
notoriously his Iron Foundry) developed
out of this. The process of extending
musical vocabulary by exploring all
available tones was pushed further by the
use of Microtones in works by Charles
Ives, Julián Carrillo, Alois Hába, John
Foulds, Ivan Wyschnegradsky, Harry
Partch and Mildred Couper among many
others. Microtones are those intervals that
are smaller than a semitone; human voices
and unfretted strings can easily produce
them by going in between the "normal"
notes, but other instruments will have
more difficulty—the piano and organ have
no way of producing them at all, aside
from retuning and/or major
reconstruction.

In the 1940s and 50s composers, notably

Pierre Schaeffer, started to explore the
application of technology to music in
musique concrète (Dack 2002). The term
electroacoustic music was later coined to
include all forms of music involving
magnetic tape, computers, synthesizers,
multimedia, and other electronic devices
and techniques. Live electronic music
uses live electronic sounds within a
performance (as opposed to preprocessed
sounds that are overdubbed during a
performance), Cage's Cartridge Music
being an early example. Spectral music
(Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail) is a
further development of electroacoustic
music that uses analyses of sound spectra
to create music (Dufourt 1981; Dufourt
1991). Cage, Berio, Boulez, Milton Babbitt,
Luigi Nono and Edgard Varèse all wrote
electroacoustic music.

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. The term experimental music
was coined by Cage to describe works that
produce unpredictable results (Mauceri
1997, 197), according to the definition "an
experimental action is one the outcome of
which is not foreseen" (Cage 1961, 39).
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 (McBurney 2004,). Other
composers, such as Benjamin Britten (War
Requiem), explored political themes in
their works, albeit entirely at their own
volition (Evans 1979, 450). 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 latter quarter of the century,
eclecticism and polystylism became
important. These, as well as minimalism,
New Complexity, and New Simplicity, are
more fully explored in their respective
articles.

Styles

Romantic style E…

At the end of the 19th century (often called

the Fin de siècle), the Romantic style was
starting to break apart, moving along
various parallel courses, such as
Impressionism and Post-romanticism. In
the 20th century, the different styles that
emerged from the music of the previous
century influenced composers to follow
new trends, sometimes as a reaction to
that music, sometimes as an extension of
it, and both trends co-existed well into the
20th century. The former trends, such as
Expressionism are discussed later.

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
(Neighbour 2001, 582) and, more generally,
that "the composer who most directly and
completely connects late Wagner and the
20th century is Arnold Schoenberg"
(Salzman 1988, 10).

Neoclassicism E…
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 (Whittall 2001). Famous
examples include Prokofiev's Classical
Symphony and Stravinsky's Pulcinella,
Symphony of Psalms, and Concerto in E-
flat "Dumbarton Oaks". Paul Hindemith
(Symphony: Mathis der Maler), Darius
Milhaud, Francis Poulenc (Concert
champêtre), and Manuel de Falla (El
retablo de maese Pedro, Harpsichord
Concerto) also used this style. Maurice
Ravel's Le tombeau de Couperin is often
seen as neo-baroque (an architectural
term), though the distinction between the
terms is not always made.

Jazz-influenced classical
composition
E…

This section does not cite any sources.

Learn more
George Gershwin

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
 Constant Lambert
Darius Milhaud
Maurice Ravel
Gunther Schuller (Third Stream)
John Serry Sr.
Dmitri Shostakovich
Karlheinz Stockhausen
Igor Stravinsky

Movements

Impressionism E…
Claude Debussy (1908)

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"
(Machlis 1979, 86–87).

Other composers associated with

impressionism include Maurice Ravel,
Albert Roussel, Isaac Albéniz, Paul Dukas,
Manuel de Falla, Charles Martin Loeffler,
Charles Griffes, Frederick Delius, Ottorino
Respighi, Cyril Scott and Karol
Szymanowski (Machlis 1979, 115–18).
Many French composers continued
impressionism's language through the
1920s and later, including Albert Roussel,
Charles Koechlin, André Caplet, and, later,
Olivier Messiaen. Composers from non-
Western cultures, such as Tōru Takemitsu,
and jazz musicians such as Duke Ellington,
Gil Evans, Art Tatum, and Cecil Taylor also
have been strongly influenced by the
impressionist musical language (Pasler
2001a).

Modernism E…

Futurism E…
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

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 (Russolo
1913). 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. Sergei Prokofiev, Maurice
Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, Arthur Honegger,
George Antheil, Leo Ornstein, and Edgard
Varèse are among the notable composers
in the first half of the century who were
influenced by futurism. Characteristic
features of later 20th-century music with
origins in futurism include the prepared
piano, integral serialism, extended vocal
techniques, graphic notation,
improvisation, and minimalism (Dennis
and Powell 2001).

Free dissonance and

experimentalism
E…

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 (Burkholder 2001). 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 E…

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 (Fanning 2001).

Postmodern music E…

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 (Meyer
1994, 331).

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
(Williams 2002, 241). 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 Aguila, USA.

Minimalism E…

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 Piano
Phase (1967, for two pianos), and
Drumming (1970–71, for percussion,
female voices and piccolo) employ the
technique called phasing in which a
phrase played by one player maintaining a
constant pace is played simultaneously by
another but at a slightly quicker pace. This
causes the players to go "out of phase"
with each other and the performance may
continue until they come back in phase.

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 (Nyman
1999, 139). (See also experimental music.)
Techniques

Atonality and twelve-tone technique E…

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 (Schoenberg 1975,
213). 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 Anton Webern and Alban Berg

and these three composers are often
referred to as the principal members of the
Second Viennese School (Haydn, Mozart
and Beethoven—and sometimes Schubert
—being regarded as the First Viennese
School in this context). Webern wrote
works using a rigorous twelve-tone
method and influenced the development
of total serialism. Berg, like Schoenberg,
employed twelve-tone technique within a
late-romantic or post-romantic style (Violin
Concerto, which quotes a Bach Choral and
uses Classical form). He wrote two major
operas (Wozzeck and Lulu).

Electronic music
Edgard Varèse, one of the pioneers of 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
(Emmerson and Smalley 2001). 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, Stockhausen's
Hymnen, Edgard Varèse's Déserts, and
Mario Davidovsky's series of
Synchronisms are three examples.

Other notable 20th-century

composers
Various prominent composers from the
20th century are not associated with any
widely recognised compositional
movement. The list below includes some
of those, along with several notable
classifiable composers who are not
mentioned in the preceding parts of this
article:

Samuel Adler
Béla Bartók
Havergal Brian
Carlos Chávez
Edward Elgar
George Enescu
Gabriel Fauré
Morton Feldman
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
Patric Standford
Michael Tippett
Joan Tower
Ralph Vaughan Williams
Heitor Villa-Lobos
William Walton
Judith Weir
Mikis Theodorakis

See also
Contemporary classical music

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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
Grun, Constantin. 2006. Arnold
Schönberg und Richard Wagner: Spuren
einer aussergewöhnlichen Beziehung, 2
volumes. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht Unipress. ISBN 3-89971-266-8
(volume 1), 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 0-415-
93847-3, ISBN 978-0-415-93847-1
Roberts, Paul. 2008. Claude Debussy.
20th-Century Composers. London and
New York: Phaidon Press. ISBN 0-7148-
3512-9, ISBN 978-0-7148-3512-9
Salzman, Eric. 2002. Twentieth-Century
Music: An Introduction, 4th edition.
 Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
ISBN 0-13-095941-3
Simms, Bryan R. 1996. Music of the
Twentieth Century: Style and Structure,
2nd edition. New York: Schirmer Books;
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.

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)
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

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