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Identify key stylistic attributes of twentieth-century modernist music. Compare and contrast the stylistic characteristics of different movements in twentieth- and twenty-first-century music, including impressionism, expressionism, primitivism, neoclassicism, minimalism, and post-minimalism.
The 20th century was clearly a period of widespread experimentation. Many composers wanted the freedom to explore new com-positional 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.
Jul 13, 2023 · This guide presents basic and specialized resources for researching the music composed during the 20th- and 21st-Century. It broadly covers all the styles, genres, cultures, creators, and social aspects of music that flourished during this time period.
- Introduction to Impressionism, Expressionism, and Twelve-Tone
- Music of The 20th Century
- History
- Impressionism
- Introduction
- Music and Literature
- Claude Debussy
- Early Life
- Music Style
- Prelude to The Afternoon of The A Faun
This section includes readings that will provide an overview of major trends in the Modern era. The readings will specifically focus on impressionism, expressionism, and twelve-tone technique. It also provides specific information on composers and pieces created in those styles. This section includes the following pages: 1. Music of the 20th Centur...
Let’s begin the study of our final historical period with an overview of major trends and composers from the era. As you read this page, please pay special attention to the fact that this description focuses on compositional techniques and very little is said about dominant genres. The 20th century was clearly a period of widespread experimentation...
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. The term was actually loathed by ...
The first post-Romantic movement we’ll study is Impressionism. As you’ll see from the linked article, Impressionism was a movement in the visual arts, namely painting, centered in Paris in the late 19th century. The term was later applied, not always to the liking of the composers, to the music of early 20th-century French composers who were turnin...
Impressionism is a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s. Impressionist painting characteristics include relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes; open composition; emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its chang...
Musical Impressionism is the name given to a movement in European classical music that arose in the late 19th century and continued into the middle of the 20th century. Originating in France, musical Impressionism is characterized by suggestion and atmosphere and eschews the emotional excesses of the Romantic era. Impressionist composers favored sh...
One of the towering figures of impressionism in music, though he did not approve of that term being applied to his music, is Claude Debussy. A child prodigy and difficult personality, his innovations are seen as the beginnings of modernism in music.
Debussy was born Achille-Claude Debussy(he later reversed his forenames) on 22 August 1862 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France, the oldest of five children. His father, Manuel-Achille Debussy, owned a china shop there; his mother, Victorine Manoury Debussy, was a seamstress. The family moved to Paris in 1867, but in 1870, Debussy’s pregnant mother fle...
Rudolph Reti points out the following features of Debussy’s music, which “established a new concept of tonality in European music”: 1. Glittering passages and webs of figurations that distract from occasional absence of tonality; 2. Frequent use of parallel chords which are “in essence not harmonies at all, but rather ‘chordal melodies,’ enriched u...
Though the piece was composed in the late 19th century, Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun is seen by no less a figure of modernism as Pierre Boulez as the beginning of modern music. If you’re interested, here is an English translation of the Mallarme poemupon which Debussy based his composition.
Although almost all composers of the 20th century sought out to create something new, many had different approaches. This century saw musical extremes- from changing harmony, rhythm, mood and performance. Nearly every aspect that works together to create a musical work was somehow altered during this time period.
Jul 13, 2023 · This guide presents basic and specialized resources for researching the music composed during the 20th- and 21st-Century. It broadly covers all the styles, genres, cultures, creators, and social aspects of music that flourished during this time period.
In music, modernism is an aesthetic stance underlying the period of change and development in musical language that occurred around the turn of the 20th century, a period of diverse reactions in challenging and reinterpreting older categories of music, innovations that led to new ways of organizing and approaching harmonic, melodic, sonic, and r...
