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- 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.
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- History
- Styles
- Movements
- Techniques
- Electronic Music
- Other Notable 20Th-Century Composers
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 I...
Romantic style
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 Impressionismand 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 Expressioni...
Neoclassicism
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...
Jazz-influenced classical composition
A number of composers combined elements of the jazzidiom with classical compositional styles, notably: 1. Malcolm Arnold 2. Leonard Bernstein 3. Marc Blitzstein 4. Aaron Copland 5. George Gershwin 6. Nikolai Kapustin 7. Constant Lambert 8. Darius Milhaud 9. Maurice Ravel 10. Gunther Schuller(third stream) 11. John Serry Sr. 12. Dmitri Shostakovich 13. Karlheinz Stockhausen 14. Igor Stravinsky
Impressionism
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". Other composers associated with impressionism include Maurice Ravel,...
Free dissonance and experimentalism
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. 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 res...
Expressionism
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.
Atonality and twelve-tone technique
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. His first large-scale work e...
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 ...
Some prominent 20th-century composers are not associated with any widely recognised school of composition. The list below includes some of those, as well as notable classifiable composers not mentioned earlier in this article:
- Musicnotes
- The Beatles. The Beatles exploded out of north England with their debut single "Love Me Do," unleashing a sound unlike any musical artists' that came before them.
- Led Zeppelin. While firmly entrenched in the rock genre, Led Zeppelin's eclectic sound had a strong influence on the heavy metal bands that followed. The band possessed a unique combination of passion and expertise, infused with mystery and an experimental edge that kept them on the fringe.
- Johnny Cash. Johnny Cash, the original Man in Black, created a brand of country-folk music with grueling life experiences at its core. He wrote well over 1,000 songs in his lifetime, with more than 100 hits that pushed genre boundaries and influenced musical artists in rock, country, the blues, and even rap.
- Louis Armstrong. Louis Armstrong tops the list of the most influential black music artists in history. The informal, swinging vocal style he crafted during the Harlem Renaissance impacted such greats as Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and a host of both jazz and pop artists in subsequent generations.
The 20th century was a breeding ground of musical exploration, innovation, and transformation unlike any other era in history. Breaking with the traditions of the past, early 20th-century composers upended the old order of concert music, igniting both passionate admiration and white-hot controversy with works...
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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.
Sep 19, 2016 · The 20 th century saw man-kind at its most imaginative and daring, and its most destructive. Our art reflects this dichotomy. Timeline is an exploration into the development of Western music.
Oct 21, 2014 · Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) (The Art Archive/Alamy) “It would be inconceivable,” said Schoenberg, “to attack the heroes who make daring flights over the ocean or to the North Pole, for their...
