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What was music like in the 20th century?
What are the top 100 Songs of the 20th century?
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- Claude Debussy: Pelléas Et Mélisande (1902) Pelléas Et Mélisande was the only opera impressionist composer Debussy wrote. With his librettist, the Belgian poet and playwright Maurice Maeterlinck, the composer explored the human psyche and supernatural themes in the piece.
- Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 6 (1904) Gustav Mahler composed his sixth symphony at a prosperous time in his life, after he’d married the Austrian-American composer, author, and socialite Alma Schindler, and had his second child.
- Lili Boulanger: Faust et Hélène (1912) Lili Boulanger was the sister of the famous pedagogue Nadia Boulanger, and the first female composer to win the Prix de Rome composition prize.
- Igor Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring (1913) Russian composer Igor Stravinsky’s crowning masterpiece was penned in the 20th century. The Rite of Spring is a ballet composed by Stravinsky for Sergei’s Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes company.
THE TOP 100 SONGS OF THE 20TH CENTURY. Author: alexvankamp.
- 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...
- 15 min
Folk music (Vaughan Williams' Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus, Gustav Holst 's A Somerset Rhapsody) and jazz (Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, Darius Milhaud 's La création du monde) were also influential. In the last quarter of the century, eclecticism and polystylism became important.
- Benjamin Poore
- 57 min
- Igor Stravinsky, Le Sacre du printemps, 1913. Where to start? Stravinsky’s 1913 ballet marshalled a fearsome arsenal of compositional techniques that shaped the music of the next hundred years.
- Alban Berg, Wozzeck, 1925. Contemporary music on stage would be unimaginable without the sound-world of Alban Berg’s 1925 opera, based on the play by Georg Büchner about the soldier whose world is annihilated.
- Olivier Messiaen, Turangalîla-Symphonie, 1949. The noisy, twittering exoticism of Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie is in some respects totally singular and unrepeatable, an eighty-minute monster that bathes audiences in sickly sexiness.
- Pierre Boulez, Le Marteau sans maître, 1955. Intuitive, glittering, alchemical: Pierre Boulez’s settings of the poetry of René Char for viola, voice, guitar, alto flute, vibraphone and xylorimba is one of the high points of the postwar avant-garde.
Oct 10, 2022 · Oct 10, 2022 by Dr Justin Wildridge. Characteristics of 20th Century Music. One of the most important developments in 20 th Century classical music was the effective dissolving of tonality.
1918-2018: 20 works that defined a century - Classical Music
