LEARNING MODULE

FAMOUS COMPOSERS OF 20TH CENTURY MUSIC

● Claude Debussy (22 August 1862 – 25 March 1918)

was a French composer. He is sometimes seen as the

first Impressionist composer, although he vigorously rejected the term.
He was among the most influential composers of the late 19th and
early 20th centuries.
Born to a family of modest means and little cultural involvement,
Debussy showed enough musical talent to be admitted at the age of
ten to France's leading music college, the Conservatoire de Paris. He
originally studied the piano, but found his vocation in innovative
composition, despite the disapproval of the Conservatoire's
conservative professors. He took many years to develop his mature
style, and was nearly 40 when he achieved international fame in 1902
with the only opera he completed,  HYPERLINK
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pell%C3%A9as_et_M
%C3%A9lisande_(opera)" \o "Pelléas et Mélisande (opera)" Pelléas et
Mélisande.

● Joseph Maurice Ravel (7 March 1875 – 28 December 1937)

was a French composer, pianist and conductor. He is often associated

with impressionism along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy,
although both composers rejected the term. In the 1920s and 1930s
Ravel was internationally regarded as France's greatest living
composer.
Born to a music-loving family, Ravel attended France's premier music
college, the Paris Conservatoire; he was not well regarded by its
conservative establishment, whose biased treatment of him caused a
scandal. After leaving the conservatoire, Ravel found his own way as a
composer, developing a style of great clarity and incorporating
elements of modernism, baroque, neoclassicism and, in his later
works, jazz. He liked to experiment with musical form, as in his best-
known work,  HYPERLINK "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bol
%C3%A9ro" \o "Boléro" Boléro (1928), in which repetition takes the
place of development. He made some orchestral arrangements of
other composers' music, of which his 1922 version
of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition is the best known

● Arnold Schoenberg (13 September 1874 – 13 July 1951)

was an Austrian composer and painter, associated with the
expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the
Second Viennese School. With the rise of the Nazi Party, by 1938
Schoenberg’s works were labelled as degenerate music because he
was Jewish (Anon. 1997–2013); he moved to the United States in 1934.
Schoenberg was known early in his career for simultaneously extending
the traditionally opposed German Romantic styles of Brahms and
Wagner. Later, his name would come to personify innovations in
atonality (although Schoenberg himself detested that term) that would
become the most polemical feature of 20th-century art music. In the
1920s, Schoenberg developed the twelve-tone technique, an
influential compositional method of manipulating an ordered series of
all twelve notes in the chromatic scale. He also coined the term
developing variation and was the first modern composer to embrace
ways of developing motifs without resorting to the dominance of a
centralized melodic idea.

Prepared by: Ms. AILYN M. MARCO, LPT MUSIC, ARTS, PHYSICAL EDUCATION, AND HEALTH
 LEARNING MODULE

● Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varèse (December 22, 1883 – November 6, 1965)

was a French-born composer who spent the greater part of his career
in the United States.
Varèse's music emphasizes timbre and rhythm. He coined the term
"organized sound" in reference to his own musical aesthetic. Varèse's
conception of music reflected his vision of "sound as living matter" and
of "musical space as open rather than bounded". He conceived the
elements of his music in terms of "sound-masses", likening their
organization to the natural phenomenon of crystallization. Varèse
thought that "to stubbornly conditioned ears, anything new in music has
always been called noise", and he posed the question, "what is music
but organized noises?

● John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992)

was an American composer, music theorist, artist, and philosopher. A

pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-
standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading
figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of
the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was also
instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his
association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also
Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives.
Cage is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition 4′33″, which is
performed in the absence of deliberate sound; musicians who present
the work do nothing aside from being present for the duration specified
by the title. The content of the composition is not "four minutes and 33
seconds of silence," as is often assumed, but rather the sounds of the
environment heard by the audience during performance. The work's
challenge to assumed definitions about musicianship and musical
experience made it a popular and controversial topic both in
musicology and the broader aesthetics of art and performance. Cage
was also a pioneer of the prepared piano (a piano with its sound
altered by objects placed between or on its strings or hammers), for
which he wrote numerous dance-related works and a few concert
pieces. The best known of these is Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48).

Module in Music Week 2-3:

Activity 3: I can do it!

Explains the performance practice (setting, composition, role of composers/performers, and
audience) of 20th century music (MU10TC-Ib-g-4)

Direction: Using the following links explains the performance practice (setting,
composition, role of composers/ performers, and audience) of 20th century.

Prepared by: Ms. AILYN M. MARCO, LPT MUSIC, ARTS, PHYSICAL EDUCATION, AND HEALTH
 LEARNING MODULE

- Piano concerto Op. 42 by: Arnold Schoeberg https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=JEY9lmCZbIc

- 4’33 by John Cage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTEFKFiXSx4

- Poeme Electronique by: Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varese

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTEFKFiXSx4

- Bolero by: Maurice Ravel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=og4PkQGvC70

- L’enfant Prodigue by: Claude Debussy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Axca68x05O4

Prepared by: Ms. AILYN M. MARCO, LPT MUSIC, ARTS, PHYSICAL EDUCATION, AND HEALTH