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What types of music were developed during the 20th century?
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The most important influence on 20th century music? African Americans and the musical culture they brought to this country – developed within the bonds of slavery.
- 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...
Jul 7, 2018 · There were many innovations that happened during the 20th century that contributed to how music was composed and performed. The United States and non-Western cultures became influential. Composers also found inspiration from other music genres (i.e. pop) as well as other continents (i.e. Asia).
Aleatory, atonality, serialism, musique concrète, electronic music, and concept music were all developed during the century. Jazz and ethnic folk music became important influences on many composers during this century.
- Maurice Ravel. Impressionism was a movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries which focused on color and mood. Its two most prominent exponents were the French composers, Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, although both men actually rejected the term.
- Arnold Schoenberg. Our next composer, Arnold Schoenberg, was one of the pioneers of the modernist movement, which rejected tradition and embraced individuality.
- Igor Stravinsky. Born in 1882, Igo Stravinksy shot to fame when he was commissioned to write three ballets for the impresario Serge Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes company.
- Sergei Prokofiev. Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev was a musical prodigy: he began composing at six years old and wrote his first opera at just nine.
The 20th century was clearly a period of widespread experimentation and many composers wanted the freedom to explore new compositional approaches without the restrictions and expectations that accompany traditional genres. Even when longstanding genres were used, composers felt very comfortable abandoning the traditional structures of those genres.
What was being questioned publicly in many quarters at the dawn of the 20th century was the evolutionistic view of Western art music as man’s ultimate achievement in the realm of sound and its logical consequent that 19th-century harmony represented in turn music’s most advanced stage of development.
