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Artists from Elvis Presley to Chuck Berry created their rock and roll using the musical influences of boogie-woogie and blues, along with jazz. Rock's popularity quickly spread around the world,...
Find lessons on History of Music for all grades. Free interactive resources and activities for the classroom and home.
The history, characteristics, and images, including audio examples, of 20th century musical styles are explored in an up-to-date manner through the remaking of a song in various musical styles.
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Dr. Diane Earle, pianist and professor of music at Kentucky Wesleyan College, discusses the Modern period (which began in the early 20th century) as a time of great change both in society and music. She discusses tonality, melody, rhythm, dynamics, and timbre in Modern period music.
- Transitioning from The Romantic Period
- 20th Century Movements
- War and Political Upheaval
- Jazz and Ethnic Folk Influences
- Minimalism and Use of Electronics and Technology
- Aleatoric Music and Experimentalism
- Classical Music in The 21st Century
- Summary
The 20th century period of music, as its name suggests, began around 1900. It is the last of the six periods of classical music erasand comes after the romantic era that ended around 1910AD. 1. Medieval era(500-1400AD) 2. Renaissance era(1400-1600AD) 3. Baroque era(1600-1750AD) 4. Classical era(1730-1820AD) 5. Romantic era(1800-1910AD) 6. 20th Cent...
As we mentioned earlier, the 20th century isn’t made up of one style but actually several different movements that were popular with different composers and at different points throughout the 20th century. Below, we’ll take a look at some of these movements and the composers that lead the way in developing them.
With two World Wars, the 20th Century was a time of major social and political change, and it was inevitable that this would have an impact on the arts. Working in Stalinist Russia, Dmitri Shostakovich was forced to scale back his modernism in favor of a more populist, Romantic-inspired style in his symphonic works that was acceptable to the author...
Jazz, which was created by African Americans, was arguably the biggest musical development of the 20th Century. The USA was now a force to be reckoned with in the world of classical composition for the first time, and a number of American composers looked towards the artform for inspiration, including Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland and George Ger...
Starting in the 1960s, the minimalist school focused on using minimal musical material and making use of repetitive patterns, loops and electronic techniques, reflecting technological advances of the day. This music was generally more consonant-sounding and less overtly challenging than the modernist school, and composers like Phillip Glass and Ste...
As the 20th Century continued, people came up with various inventive ways of challenging the very meaning of composition. Aleatoric music is music in which some element of the composition is left to chance. Often this means that the performer gets to determine how part of the piece should be played, perhaps with a freely improvised section. Henry C...
Important classical music continues to be made in the present day in a range of styles. The internet has made music more accessible, making it easier for sub-genres to cross-pollinate and influence each other more easily. Music and notation software have also revolutionised the ways in which we make music. Film music has become incredibly popular a...
So that concludes our look at the classical music of the 20th Century. We have learned about impressionism, modernism, minimalism and aleatory, and about how war, politics and technology influenced music, as composers tore up the rules that were established in previous centuries. We hope you’ve enjoyed learning about and listening to some of this r...
This lesson enables teachers to use blues music to explore the history of African Americans in the 20th century. By studying the content of blues songs, students can learn about the...
TeachRock is proud to present The Music that Shaped America, a lesson collection that draws on the rich archive of Alan Lomax’s Association for Cultural Equity, enlivening American history of the 18th through early 20th centuries with the sounds of regional folk musics and the personal stories of its performers.
