Music of the 20th Century

✔ The start of the 20th century saw the rise of distinct musical styles that reflected a move away from the
conventions of earlier classical music.

✔ These new styles were: impressionism, expressionism, neo-classicism, avant garde music, and modern
nationalism.
IMPRESSIONISM

✔ Musical style that revealed the composer’s mind, instead of presenting an impression of the environment

✔ Musical style uses a whole-tone scale. It also applied suggested, rather than depicted, reality. It created a mood
rather than a definite picture.

✔ As the world entered the 20th century, a new era in music was introduced, and impressionism was one of the
earliest musical forms that paved the way to this modern era.

✔ Impressionism is a French movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

✔ The sentimental melodies and dramatic emotionalism of the preceding Romantic Period, whose themes and
melody are easy to recognize and enjoy, were being replaced in favor of moods and impressions.

✔ In these musical style new combinations of extended chords, harmonies, whole tone, chromatic scales, and
pentatonic scales came.

✔ Impressionism was an attempt not to depict reality, but merely to suggest it.

✔ It was meant to create an emotional mood rather than a specific picture

✔ In impressionism, the sounds of different chords overlapped lightly with each other to produce new subtle
musical colors.

✔ Chords did not have a definite order and a sense of clear resolution.

✔ This musical style uses a whole-tone scale.

✔ However in this musical style, it lacks of tonic- dominant relationship which normally gives the feeling of finality
to a piece, moods and texture and harmonic vagueness.

COMPOSERS
CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862-1918)

✔ He was born last August 22, 1862, in St. Germain-en-Laye in France.

✔ With his intention to change the sequence of music from traditional and conventional ways, he found new ways
in evolving into a new language of possibilities in harmony, rhythm, form, texture, and color which describes
distinctive musical elements.

✔ He acquired and gained reputations as an erratic pianist and rebel in theory and harmony added with other
systems of musical composition because of his passion for music.

✔ Fortunately won the top prize at the Prix de Rome competition with his composition (“L’ Enfant Prodigue”).

✔ He was called the “Father of the modern school of composition” that marks him on the styles of later 20th
century composers like Igor Stravinsky, Edgar Varese, and Olivier Messiaen.

✔ He ventured visual arts through the influenced by Monet, Pissarro, Manet, Degas and Renoir.

✔ As a person he was tender, loving and compassionate, he died with cancer in Paris last March 25, 1918 at the
height of the First World War.

✔ He was able to compose musical pieces more or less 227 which include orchestral music, chamber music, piano
music, operas, ballets, songs, and other vocal music.
Among his composition were represented by the following works:
 ✔ Ariettes Oubliees

✔ Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun

✔ String Quartet

✔ Pelleas et Melisande (1895)

✔ La Mer (1905), Images

✔ Suite Bergamasque

✔ Estampes

✔ Claire de Lune (moonlight)

MAURICE RAVEL (1875-1937)

✔ He was the son of a Basque mother and a Swiss father and born in Ciboure, France.

✔ At the age of 14, he entered the Paris Conservatory with the eminent French composer Gabriel Faure and
composed a number of masterpieces where he studied music.

✔ He characterized with unique innovative but not an atonal style of harmonic treatment with intricate and
sometimes modal and extended chordal components.

✔ Ravel’s works are only musically satisfying but also pleasantly dissonant elegantly sophisticated applying
harmonic progressions and modulations.

✔ He was a perfectionist composer adheres to classical form specifically ternary structure; he was considered as a
strong advocate of Russian music and admired the music of Chopin, Liszt, Schubert, and Mendelsshon. Ravel’s
output comprises approximately 60 pieces for piano, chamber music, song cycles, ballet, and opera.

✔ Unfortunately, he died with Aphasia on December 28, 1937.

These are the following works:

✔ Pavane for a Dead Princess (1899)

✔ Jeux d’Eau or Water Fountains (1901)

✔ String Quartet (1903)

✔ Sonatine for Piano (c.1904)

✔ Miroirs (Mirrors), 1905

✔ Gaspard de la Nuit (1908)

✔ Valses Nobles et Sentimentales (1911)

✔ Le Tombeau de Couperin (c.1917)

✔ Rhapsodie Espagnole

✔ Bolero

✔ Daphnis et Chloe (1912)

✔ La Valse (1920)

✔ Tzigane (1922)
EXPRESSIONISM MUSIC

✔ Expressionism is a term applied to an artistic style that depicts the expression of individual subjective
experience, as opposed to objective reality.

✔ Expressionist artists use their art to convey feelings and emotion rather than physical reality.

✔ These feelings can be derived from nature, society, or aesthetics.

✔ Expressionism presents atonality and the twelve-tone scale revealing composer’s mind, expressing strong
emotions, anxiety, rage, and alienation.

✔ It expresses the meaning of emotional experience rather than physical reality.

✔ One of the proponents of expressionism is Arnold Schoenberg.

ARNOLD SCHOENBERG (1874–1951)

✔ Arnold Schoenberg was an Austrian composer born last September 13, 1874, in a working-class of Suburb of
Vienna, Austria.

✔ He was famous as the exponent of the twelve-tone system with twelve tones related only to one another also
known as the serial technique. He was influenced by Richard Wagner, a German composer

✔ His contribution to music includes atonality, meaning the absence of key evolved from an emphasis on
chromatic harmony in the liberal use of the twelve tones in a chromatic scale.

✔ Apart from it, he also includes serialism and Sprechstimme which is a manner of performing a song with half-
sung and half-spoken.

✔ In 1908, he began to write approximately 213 musical compositions include concerte, orchestral music, piano
music, opera, choral music, songs, and other instrumental music.

✔ He died last July 13, 195, in Los Angeles, California, USA where he had settled since 1934.

His works include the following:

✔ Verklarte Nacht

✔ Three Pieces for Piano, op. 1

✔ Pierrot Lunaire,

✔ Gurreleider

✔ Verklarte Nacht (Transfigured Night, 1899)

IGOR STRAVINSKY (1882–1971)

✔ Igor Stravinsky was a Russian born composer and conductor who became both and American and a French
citizen, he was born last June 17, 1882, in Oraniaenbaum (now Lomonosov) Russia.

✔ His style of music is neoclassical which uses scale, cords, and tone color in a clear and traditional way with
frequent changes in meter signature, offbeat syncopation, and displacing regular accent as he utilize.

✔ He adopted the forms of 18th century music with his contemporary style of writing, very structured, precise,
controlled, full of artifice, and theatricality despite its shocking modernity.
The following are the works of Stravinsky:

✔ Firebird (1910)

✔ Petrushka (1911)

✔ The Rite of Spring (1913)

 ✔ The wedding (1923)

✔ Agon (1957),
Choral music like:

✔ Symphony of Psalms (1930)

✔ Canticum Sacrum (1955)

✔ Threni (1958)

✔ Requiem Canticles (1966)

Operas like:

✔ The Rake’s Progress (1951)

✔ Opera oratorio Oedipus Rex (1927)

✔ Other dramatic works like the Soldier’s Hale (1918).

NEO-CLASSICISM
✔ It was a partial return to a classical form of writing music with carefully modulated dissonances

✔ Neo-classicism music is different from the two movements.

✔ This is light, entertaining, cool, and independent of its emotional content.

✔ The composition style used by the composer was the seven-note diatonic scale.

SERGEI PROKOFIEFF (1891-1953)

✔ He was born last 1891 in Ukraine. He combined the movements of music like Neoclassicism,
Nationalism, and Avant-Garde composition.

✔ With his progressive technique, pulsating rhythms, melodic directness, and a resolving dissonance he
was uniquely recognized.

✔ With his desire to write music for the ballet and opera, he was given a chance to contact with
Stravinsky for Romeo and Juliet for ballet, and War and Peace for opera.

✔ He intendedly wrote a light-hearted orchestral work for children to pacify the continuing government
restrictions and disciplinary actions at the time of Avant-Garde composers entitled Peter and the Wolf.

✔ He died in Moscow on March 15, 1953.

BELA BARTOK (1881-1945)

✔ Bela Bartok was born last March 25, 1881 in Nagyszentmiklos, Hungary (Romania).

✔ Began lessons with his mother and made folk songs transcription.

✔ He opened the way to new modal kinds of harmony and irregular meter.

✔ He was a Hungarian composer and pianist, created a distinctive musical style using folk music.

✔ Meanwhile, Mikrokosmos contains a collection of six books as a legacy in music introducing and
familiarizing contemporary harmony and rhythm to the piano students technically and progressively.

✔ In 1940, he left Hungary for the United States.

 ✔ On September 26, 1945, he died of leukemia in New York City Hospital.

AVANT- GARDE

✔ Musical style associated with electronic music and dealt with the parameters or dimensions of sound in
space.

✔ This form of music was considered as the vanguard of experimentation or innovation period.

✔ The existing aesthetic and conventional type of music has been put on to criticize, rejecting the status
quo in favor of unique or original elements.

✔ Adopting extreme composition within a certain tradition the so- called “Experimental Music”.

✔ The new attitude will be altered toward musical movement and it varies in the continuity where the
notes being grouped into.
COMPOSERS
GEORGE GERSHWIN

✔ He was considered as a phenomenal composer, a cross-over artist, and a father of American Jazz.

✔ Noteworthy of evidence with his numerous songs, serious compositions remain highly popular in the
classical repertoire, and with the mixture of the primitive and sophisticated music which lasted long
after his death.

✔ He composed 369 musical works, including orchestral music, chamber music, musical theater, film
musicals, operas, and songs.

✔ Among the compositions are the following: Rhapsody in Blue (1924), and American in Paris (1928),
Porgy and Bess (1934).

✔ He was fascinated with classical music influenced by Ravel, Stravinsky, Berg, and Schoenberg as well as
the group of contemporary that shapes the character of his major works like half jazz and half classical
known as “Les Six”, refers to 6 French Composers, members of this group were Georges Auric, Francis
Paulenc, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, and Germaine Tailleferre

✔ He died last July 11, 1937 in Hollywood, California, USA.

LEONARD BERNSTEIN (1918-1990)

✔ This notable composer was born in Massachusetts, USA, he commended himself as a charismatic
conductor, pianist, composer, and lecturer to his many followers.

✔ On November 14, 1943, he was requested to be a substitute for the ailing Bruno Walter in conducting
the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in a concert.

✔ Bernstein’s compositions for the stage are the key that made people known him.

✔ Among these is the musical West Side Story (1957), an American version of Romeo and Juliet, which
displays a tuneful, off-beat, and highly atonal approach to the songs.

✔ Other outputs include another Broadway hit Candide (1956) and the much-celebrated Mass (1971).

✔ His musical compositions total around 90.

✔ He composed the music for the film On the Waterfront (1954).

 ✔ He was fondly remembered for his television series “Young People’s Concerts” (1958–1973) that
demonstrated the sounds of the various orchestral instruments and explained basic music principles to
young audiences, as well as his Harvardian Lectures.

✔ He died on October 14, 1990, in New York City, USA.

PHILLIP GLASS (1937)

✔ His style of music was criticized as uneventful and shallow because of its application to new sound yet
effective and compelling style.

✔ He was born in New York, USA of Jewish parents, and learned violin and flute at the age of 15.

✔ He was inspired by a renowned Indian satirist Ravi Shankar, and assisted the recording soundtrack for
Conrad Rooks film Chappaqua.

✔ He produced and formed ensemble works such as Music in Similar Motion (1969), Music in Changing
Paris (1970).