MUSIC OF THE 20TH CENTURY

Music of the 20th Century:

The musical works of the 20th century introduced new styles and movements of
music with dissonances, percussive sounds, and irregular rhythms. Music of the 20th
century was greatly influenced by the movements in Europe in the context of
Impressionism, Expressionism, Neo-classicism, Avant-Garde and Modern Nationalism.
These musical movements contribute various styles and distinctive compositions and
arrangements behind their innovative and experimental styles.

“The Transitory Period and the Musical Movement”

1. IMPRESSIONISM

It is a musical style that produces new indirect musical colors that lightly
overlapped in different chords with each other. It works on nature sounds like the
splashing of the waves, flowing river, chirping of the birds, and the soft music evoked
and its beauty, likeness, and brilliance. Impressionism normally gives the feeling of
finality to a piece, moods and textures, harmonic vagueness about the structure of
certain chords, and the use of a whole-tone scale.

Among the most famous impressionist composers in the world, both developed a
particular style of composition were Claude Debussy and Joseph Maurice Ravel.
CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862-1918)

He was born last August 22, 1862, in St. Germain-en-Laye in

France. With his intention to change the sequence of music from
traditional and conventional ways, he found new ways in evolving
into a new language of possibilities in harmony, rhythm, form,
texture, and color which describes distinctive musical elements.
He acquired and gained refutations as an erratic pianist and rebel
in theory and harmony added with other systems of musical
composition because of his passion for music. Fortunately won
the top prize at the Prix de Rome competition with his
composition (“L’ Enfant Prodigue”).

Among his composition were represented by the following works: Ariettes

Oubliees, Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, String Quartet, Pelleas et Melisande
(1895), La Mer (1905), Images, Suite Bergamasque, and Estampes, Claire de Lune
(moonlight). He was able to compose musical pieces more or less 227 which include
orchestral music, chamber music, piano music, operas, ballets, songs, and other vocal
music. He was inspired by Franz Liszt, Fredrick Chopin, Johann Sebastian Bach, and
Giuseppe Verdi.

He was called the “Father of the modern school of composition” that marks him
on the styles of later 20 th century composers like Igor Stravinsky, Edgar Varese, and
Olivier Messiaen. He ventured visual arts through the influenced by Monet, Pissarro,
Manet, Degas and Renoir. Furthermore, he indulged also in literary arts significantly
influenced by Mallarme, Verlaine, and Rimbaud. As a person he was tender, loving and
compassionate, he died with cancer in Paris last March 25, 1918 at the height of the
First World War.

MAURICE RAVEL (1875-1937)

He was the son of a Basque mother and a Swiss

father and born in Ciboure, France. At the age of 14, he
entered the Paris Conservatory with the eminent French
composer Gabriel Faure and composed a number of
masterpieces where he studied music. He characterized with
unique innovative but not an atonal style of harmonic
treatment with intricate and sometimes modal and extended
chordal components.

Ravel’s works are only musically satisfying but also

pleasantly dissonant elegantly sophisticated applying
harmonic progressions and modulations. Refining his delicacy and color, contrast and
effects add to the difficulty in the proper execution of the musical passages with water in
its flowing and stormy moods, as well as with human characterizations where many of
his works dealt with it. He was a perfectionist composer adheres to classical form
specifically ternary structure; he was considered as a strong advocate of Russian music
and admired the music of Chopin, Liszt, Schubert, and Mendelsshon. Ravel’s output
comprises approximately 60 pieces for piano, chamber music, song cycles, ballet, and
opera. These are the following works:

 Pavane for a Dead Princess (1899)

 Jeux d’Eau or Water Fountains (1901)
 String Quartet (1903)
 Sonatine for Piano (c.1904)
 Miroirs (Mirrors), 1905
 Gaspard de la Nuit (1908)
 Valses Nobles et Sentimentales (1911)
 Le Tombeau de Couperin (c.1917)
 Rhapsodie Espagnole
 Bolero
 Daphnis et Chloe (1912)
 La Valse (1920)
 Tzigane (1922)

Unfortunately, he died with Aphasia on December 28, 1937.

2. EXPRESSIONISM
Expressionism presents atonality and the twelve-tone scale revealing composer’s
mind, expressing strong emotions, anxiety, rage, and alienation. It expresses the
meaning of emotional experience rather than physical reality. One of the proponents of
expressionism is Arnold Schoenberg.

ARNOLD SCHOENBERG (1874-1951)

Arnold Schoenberg was an Austrian composer born last September

13, 1874, in a working-class of Suburb of Vienna, Austria. He was
famous as the exponent of the twelve-tone system with twelve tones
related only to one another also known as the serial technique. He
was influenced by Richard Wagner, a German composer.
 His contribution to music includes atonality, meaning the absence of key evolved
from an emphasis on chromatic harmony in the liberal use of the twelve tones in a
chromatic scale. Apart from it, he also includes serialism and Sprechstimmre which is a
manner of performing a song with half-sung and half-spoken. In 1908, he began to write
approximately 213 musical compositions include concerte, orchestral music, piano
music, opera, choral music, songs, and other instrumental music. His works include the
following:

 Verklarte Nacht, Three Pieces for Piano, op. 1

 Pierrot Lunaire,
 Gurreleider
 Verklarte Nacht (Transfigured Night, 1899)

He died last July 13, 195, in Los Angeles, California, USA where he had settled
since 1934.

3. NEOCLASSICISM
Neo-classicism music is different from the two movements. This is light,
entertaining, cool, and independent of its emotional content. The composition style used
by the composer was the seven-note diatonic scale. This period combines tonal
harmonies applying with slight dissonance which has a three- movement format like
shifting time signatures, complex but exciting rhythmic patterns, as well as harmonic
dissonance that produce harsh chords. The composers of this time in neo-classicism
are Francis Poulenc, Igor Stravinsky, Paul Hindemith, and Sergei Prokofeiff.

IGOR STRAVINSKY (1882-1971)

Igor Stravinsky was a Russian born composer and conductor

who became both and American and a French citizen, he was
born last June 17, 1882, in Oraniaenbaum (now Lomonosov)
Russia. His style of music is neoclassical which uses scale,
cords, and tone color in a clear and traditional way with frequent
changes in meter signature, offbeat syncopation, and displacing
regular accent as he utilize. He adopted the forms of 18 th
century music with his contemporary style of writing, very
structured, precise, controlled, full of artifice, and theatricality
despite its shocking modernity. In 1939, he went to USA and venture another style of
music to experience his passion and wanted to integrate his knowledge in Russian
music. However, he opted and slowly turned back into his nationalistic style of Russian
music and cultivate his neoclassical style in which Stravinsky’s work.
Stravinsky was able to produce a musical output of approximately 127 works,
including concerti, orchestral music, instrumental music, operas, and ballets, solo vocal,
and choral music. On April 6, 1971 he died in New York City. The following are the
works of Stravinsky:
Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), The Rite of Spring (1913), The wedding
(1923), AND Agon (1957), orchestral music like Symphonies of wind instruments
(1920), concerto for pianos and winds (1924), Dumbarton Oaks Concerto (1938),
Symphony in C (1940), Symphony in 3 movements (1945), and Ebon concerto (1945);
choral music like Symphony of Psalms (1930), Canticum Sacrum (1955), Threni (1958),
and Requiem Canticles (1966); and operas like The Rake’s Progress (1951), opera
oratorio Oedipus Rex (1927), and other dramatic works like the Soldier’s Hale (1918).

SERGEI PROKOFIEFF (1891-1953)

He was born last 1891 in Ukraine. He combined the movements of music like
Neoclassicism, Nationalism, and Avant-Garde composition. With
his progressive technique, pulsating rhythms, melodic
directness, and a resolving dissonance he was uniquely
recognized. In writing symphonies, chamber music, concerte,
and solo instrumental music, he became a productive and prolific
composer. He worked and linked with other composers,
combined styles of Haydn and Mozart as classicist and Igor
Stravinsky as Neo-Classicist also inspired by Beethoven with two
highly regarded violin concerte and two string quartets.
With his desire to write music for the ballet and opera, he
was given a chance to contact with Diaghilev and Stravinsky for Romeo and Juliet for
ballet, and War and Peace for opera. He intendedly wrote a light-hearted orchestral
work for children to pacify the continuing government restrictions and disciplinary
actions at the time of Avant-Garde composers entitled Peter and the Wolf. He died in
Moscow on March 15, 1953.

BELA BARTOK (1881-1945)

Bela Bartok was born last March 25, 1881 in Nagyszentmiklos,
Hungary (Romania). Began lessons with his mother and made folk
songs transcription. He opened the way to new modal kinds of harmony
and irregular meter. He was a Hungarian composer and pianist, created
a distinctive musical style using folk music. He excelled in instrumental
music writing many works for solo piano pieces, six string quartets and other chamber
music, three concertos for piano, one for violin and several compositions for orchestras,
the reinterpreted, traditional-musical forms like the rondo, fugue, and sonata. He utilized
changing meters and strong syncopations in his music style.
The six string quartet is the greatest achievement of his creative life that lasted
for full 30 years for their completion. He combined difficult and dissonant music with
mysterious sounds as description of the composition.
Approximately 700 musical compositions include concerti, orchestral music,
piano music, instrumental music, dramatic music, choral music, and songs. The
concerto for orchestra in 1943, is a five-movement work featuring the exceptional
talents of each various soloist in an intricately constructive piece. On the other hand,
Allegro Barbaro (1911) drew percussive sounds with swirling rhythms where a solo
piano is punctuated. Meanwhile, Mikrokosmos contains a collection of six books as a
legacy in music introducing and familiarizing contemporary harmony and rhythm to the
piano students technically and progressively. In 1940, he left Hungary for the United
States. On September 26, 1945, he died of leukemia in New York City Hospital.

4. AVANT-GARDE

This form of music was considered as the vanguard of experimentation or

innovation period. The existing aesthetic and conventional type of music has been put
on to criticize, rejecting the status quo in favor of unique or original elements. Adopting
extreme composition within a certain tradition the so- called “Experimental Music”. The
new attitude will be altered toward musical movement and it varies in the continuity
where the notes being grouped into.
The proponents of the Avant-Garde Movement of Music are George Gershwin,
Leonard Bernstein, and Phillip Glass.

GEORGE GERSHWIN
He was considered as a phenomenal composer, a cross-over artist, and a father
of American Jazz. Noteworthy of evidence with his numerous songs, serious
compositions remain highly popular in the classical repertoire, and with the mixture of
the primitive and sophisticated music which lasted long after his death. He composed
369 musical works, including orchestral music, chamber music, musical theater, film
musicals, operas, and songs.

Among the compositions are the following: Rhapsody

in Blue (1924), and American in Paris (1928), Porgy and
Bess (1934). He was fascinated with classical music
influenced by Ravel, Stravinsky, Berg, and Schoenberg as
well as the group of contemporary that shapes the
character of his major works like half jazz and half classical known as “Les Six”. He died
last July 11, 1937 in Hollywood, California, USA.

LEONARD BERNSTEIN (1918-1990)

This notable composer was born in

Massachusetts, USA, he commended himself as a
charismatic conductor, pianist, composer, and
lecturer to his many followers. On November 14,
1943, he was requested to be a substitute for the
ailing Bruno Walter in conducting the New York
Philharmonic Orchestra in a concert.
Bernstein’s compositions for the stage are the
key that made people known him. Among these is
the musical West Side Story (1957), an American version of Romeo and Juliet, which
displays a tuneful, off-beat, and highly atonal approach to the songs. Other outputs
include another Broadway hit Candide (1956) and the much-celebrated Mass (1971).
His musical compositions total around 90. He composed the music for the film
On the Waterfront (1954). He was fondly remembered for his television series “Young
People’s Concerts” (1958–1973) that demonstrated the sounds of the various orchestral
instruments and explained basic music principles to young audiences, as well as his
Harvardian Lectures. He died on October 14, 1990, in New York City, USA.

PHILLIP GLASS (1937)

He is one of the Avant-Garde composers who also
explored the areas of ballet, opera, theatre, film, and even
television jingles. His style of music was criticized as
uneventful and shallow because of its application to new
sound yet effective and compelling style.
He was born in New York, USA of Jewish parents,
and learned violin and flute at the age of 15. He was inspired
by a renowned Indian satirist Ravi Shankar, and assisted
the recording soundtrack for Conrad Rooks film Chappaqua.
He produced and formed ensemble works such as Music in Similar Motion (1969),
Music in Changing Paris (1970). He has several achievements in the light of music, are
the following three operas:

Einstein on the Beach (1976)

 Collaborated with Robert Wilson in conceptualizing and produce
four-hour opera and instantly sold –out during the play at New York
Metropolitan Opera House
Satyagraha (1980) and Akhnaten (1984)
  Based on the lives of the prominent people in the world like
Mahatma Gandhi, Leo Tolstoy, Martin Luther King, and Egyptian
pharaoh.
In this time, he combined the overlapping style of composition blended with a
repetitive signature in the grandeur on stage. He obtained 170 compositions and now
living in Nova Scotia, Canada, and New York, USA.

5. MODERN NATIONALISM
Nationalistic composers and musical innovators were misled in the 20th century
music development combined with modern techniques with folk materials. Prominent
Russian composers like Bela Bartok and Sergei Prokofieff who were the neoclassicist
infused classical techniques crossing rhythms and shifting meters. They made
extensive use of polytonality that uses two or more tonal centers simultaneously.
In Russia, five highly considered gifted individuals that infused chromatic
harmony, incorporated with Russian folk music, liturgical chants in their thematic
materials namely Modest Mussorgsky, Mili Balakirev, Alexander Borodin, Cesar Cui,
and Nikolai Rimsky Korsakov. Furthermore, Erik Satie, a French composer who gave a
colorful figure in the early 20th century, specifically avant-garde and modern
nationalism.