(

MAURICE RAVEL 1875-1937 Joseph-Maurice Ravel)

MUSIC STYLE: IMPRESSIONISM

Maurice Ravel, (born March 7, 1875, Ciboure,

France—died Dec. 28, 1937, Paris), French
composer. At age 14 he was admitted to the
Paris Conservatoire. Completing his piano
studies, he returned to study composition with
Gabriel Fauré, writing the important piano
piece Jeux d’eau (completed 1901) and a string
quartet. In the next decade he produced some of
his best-known music, including Pavane pour
une infante défunte (1899), the String
Quartet (1903), and the Sonatine for piano
(1905). His great ballet Daphnis et Chloé (1912)
was commissioned by the impresario Sergey
Diaghilev. Other works include the
opera L’Enfant et les sortileges (1925), the
suite Le Tombeau de Couperin (1917), and the
orchestral works La Valse (1920)
and Boléro (1928). Careful and precise, Ravel
possessed great gifts as an orchestrator, and his
works are universally admired for their superb
craftsmanship; he has remained the most
widely popular of all French composers.

CLAUDE DEBUSSY (ACHILLE-CLAUDE DEBUSSY)

MUSIC STYLE: IMPRESSIONISM

Claude Debussy, in full Achille-Claude

Debussy, (born August 22, 1862, Saint-
Germain-en-Laye, France—died March 25,
1918, Paris), French composer whose works
were a seminal force in the music of the 20th
century. He developed a highly original system
of harmony and musical structure that
expressed in many respects the ideals to which
the Impressionist and Symbolist painters and
writers of his time aspired. His major works
include Clair de lune (“Moonlight,” in Suite
bergamasque, 1890–1905), Prélude à l’après-
midi d’un faune (1894; Prelude to the
Afternoon of a Faun), the opera Pelléas et
Mélisande (1902), and La Mer (1905; “The
Sea”).

.
 Béla Bartók
MUSIC STYLE: NEO-CLASSICISM
Béla Bartók, (born March 25, 1881, Nagyszentmiklós,
Hung., Austria-Hungary—died Sept. 26, 1945, New York,
N.Y., U.S.), Hungarian composer, pianist, and
ethnomusicologist. He was an accomplished pianist at an
early age. In 1904 he set about researching Hungarian folk
music, having discovered that the folk-music repertory
generally accepted as Hungarian was in fact largely urban
Roma (Gypsy) music (see Rom). His fieldwork with the
composer Zoltán Kodály formed the basis for all later
research in the field, and he published major studies of
Hungarian, Romanian, and Slovakian folk music. He
worked folk themes and rhythms into his own music,
achieving a style that was at once nationalistic and deeply
personal. He also toured widely as a virtuoso pianist. In
1940 he immigrated to the U.S., where he had great
difficulty making a living. His works include the
opera Bluebeard’s Castle (1911), six celebrated string
quartets (1908–39), the didactic piano
set Mikrokosmos (1926–39), Sonata for Two Pianos and
Percussion (1937), Concerto for Orchestra (1943), and
three piano concertos (1926, 1931, 1945).

SERGEY PROKOFIEV
( Sergey Sergeyevich Prokofiev)
MUSIC STYLE: NEO-CLASSICISM
Sergey Prokofiev, (born April 23, 1891, Sontsovka,
Ukraine, Russian Empire—died March 5, 1953, Moscow,
Russia, U.S.S.R.), Russian composer and pianist. Son of a
pianist, he began writing piano pieces at age five and wrote
an opera at nine. He studied at the St. Petersburg
Conservatory (1904–14) with Nikolay Rimsky-
Korsakov and others. Prolific and arrogant, from 1910 he
made a living by performing as a virtuoso. He played his
own first concerto at his graduation recital. During World
War I he wrote his Scythian Suite (1915) and First
(“Classical”) Symphony (1917). His opera The Love for
Three Oranges premiered in 1921 in Chicago. Paris was his
base from 1922, and during the 1920s he produced three new symphonies and the operas The Fiery
Angel (1927) and The Gambler (1928). In the 1930s he was drawn back to his homeland; there he wrote the
score for the ballet Romeo and Juliet (1936), the symphonic children’s tale Peter and the Wolf (1936), and
striking national music for Sergey Eisenstein’s film Alexander Nevsky (1938). World War II inspired the score
to Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (1942–45) and the opera War and Peace (1943). The government’s
denunciation of his work in 1948 was a harsh blow; his health failed, and he died on the same day as Joseph
Stalin.
 Francis Poulenc
MUSIC STYLE: NEO-CLASSICISM

Francis Poulenc, (born Jan. 7, 1899, Paris, France—died

Jan. 30, 1963, Paris), composer who made an important
contribution to French music in the decades after World
War I and whose songs are considered among the best
composed during the 20th century.

Poulenc was largely self-taught. His first compositions—

Rapsodie Nègre (1917), Trois Mouvements Perpétuels, for
piano, and Sonata for Piano Duet (1918) and his settings
of Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem Le Bestiaire and Jean
Cocteau’s Cocardes (1919)—were witty pieces with streaks
of impudent parody. Humour remained an important
characteristic of his music, as in the Surrealistic comic
opera Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1947; The Breasts of
Tiresias), based on a farce by Apollinaire.

Philip Glass

MUSIC STYLES: AVANT GARDE MUSIC

Philip Glass (born January 31, 1937) is an American

composer and pianist. He is widely regarded as one of
the most influential composers of the late 20th century.
Glass's work has been associated with minimalism,
being built up from repetitive phrases and shifting
layers.

Life and Music

At the University of Chicago, Glass played piano and concentrated on such composers as Ives and Webern
while studying a major in mathematics and philosophy.

Determined to become a composer, he went on to attend the Julliard School, New York, where he abandoned
the 12-tone techniques he had been using in Chicago for preferred American composers like Copland and
Schuman.

Glass studied with Vincent Persichetti, Darius Milhaud and William Bergsma, yet had still not found his own
voice and moved to Paris, where he did two years of intensive study under Nadia Boulanger.

In Paris, Glass began researching music in North Africa, India and the Himalayas with an aim to applying
Eastern techniques to his own work.

In 1976, the Philip Glass Ensemble reached its apogee with the Philip Glass/Robert Wilson opera 'Einstein on
the Beach', a 4-1/2 hour epic now seen as a landmark in 20th-century music-theatre.
 George Gershwin
MUSIC STYLES: AVANT GARDE MUSIC

George Gershwin, orig. Jacob Gershvin, (born Sept. 26, 1898,

Brooklyn, N.Y., U.S.—died July 11, 1937, Hollywood, Calif.),
U.S. composer. Born to Russian-Jewish immigrants, he
heard jazz performed live from about age six. In his teens he
worked as a song plugger (playing piano in Tin Pan Alley to
demonstrate sheet music for potential customers), and in 1916 he
published his first song. In 1919 his “Swanee” was performed by
Al Jolson and achieved extraordinary success. Gershwin’s first
complete score was for the show La, La Lucille (1919). The
bandleader Paul Whiteman commissioned from him the hugely
successful orchestral work Rhapsody in Blue (1924). It was
revolutionary for its incorporation of the jazz idiom (blue notes, syncopated rhythms, onomatopoeic
instrumental effects) into a symphonic context. Gershwin’s first major Broadway success, Lady, Be
Good! (1924), was a collaboration with his brother, lyricist Ira Gershwin. They soon established themselves as
one of the great teams in Broadway history; their shows included Oh, Kay! (1926), Strike Up the
Band (1927), Funny Face (1927), Girl Crazy (1930), and the satire Of Thee I Sing (1931), the first musical to
win a Pulitzer Prize. He also scored several successful films. His most ambitious work was the “folk
opera” Porgy and Bess (1935), a collaboration with Ira and novelist DuBose Heyward. Gershwin’s classical
compositions include a piano concerto (1925) and the tone poem An American in Paris (1928). His early death
was the result of a brain tumour.

LEONARD BERNSTEIN
American composer and conductor
MUSIC STYLES: AVANT GARDE MUSIC

LEONARD BERNSTEIN (August 25, 1918- October 14, 1990) was a

world-renowned conductor and composer, and one of classical music's
icons of the 20th century. He was Music Director of the New York
Philharmonic and conducted the world's major orchestras, leaving behind
an enormous legacy of audio and video recordings. His books, as well as
the much-beloved televised Young People's Concerts with the New York
Philharmonic, established him as a leading educator. His orchestral and
choral works include three symphonies (No. 1 "Jeremiah", No. 2 "Age of
Anxiety", and No. 3 "Kaddish"), Serenade, MASS, Chichester Psalms,
Songfest, Divertimento for Orchestra, Arias and
Barcarolles, and Concerto for Orchestra. Bernstein's works for the
Broadway stage include On the Town, Wonderful Town, Candide and the
immensely popular West Side Story. In addition to the West Side
Story collaboration, Bernstein worked with choreographer Jerome
Robbins on three major ballets, Fancy Free, Facsimile and Dybbuk. Mr. Bernstein was the recipient of many honors,
including eleven Emmy Awards, one Tony Award, the Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award, and the Kennedy
Center Honors.
 EDGARD
VARÈSE
American composer
MUSIC STYLES: MODERN NATIONALISM
Edgard Varèse, original name Edgar Varèse, (born Dec.
22, 1883, Paris, France—died Nov. 8, 1965, New York, N.Y.,
U.S.), French-born American composer and innovator in
20th-century techniques of sound production.

Varèse spent his boyhood in Paris, Burgundy, and Turin,

Italy. After composing without formal instruction as a youth,
he later studied under Vincent d’Indy, Albert Roussel,
and Charles Widor and was strongly encouraged by Romain
Rolland and Claude Debussy. In 1907 he went to Berlin,
where he was influenced by Richard Strauss and Ferruccio
Busoni. In 1915 he immigrated to the United States.

Varèse’s music is dissonant, nonthematic, and rhythmically

asymmetric; he conceived of it as bodies of sound in space. After the early 1950s, when he finally
gained access to the electronic sound equipment he desired, he concentrated on electronic
music.Varèse actively promoted performances of works by other 20th-century performers and
founded the International Composers’ Guild in 1921 and the Pan-American Association of Composers
in 1926; these organizations were responsible for performances and premieres of works by Béla
Bartók, Alban Berg, Carlos Chávez, Henry Cowell, Charles Ives, Maurice Ravel, Wallingford
Riegger, Francis Poulenc, Anton von Webern, and others. Varèse also founded the Schola Cantorum
of Santa Fe, N.M., in 1937, and the New Chorus (later, Greater New York Chorus) in 1941 to perform
music of past eras, including works of Pérotin, Heinrich Schütz, Claudio Monteverdi, and Marc-
Antoine Charpentier.Varèse’s works include Hyperprism for wind instruments and percussion
(1923); Ionisation for percussion, piano, and two sirens (1931); and Density 21.5 for
unaccompanied flute (1936). His Déserts (1954) employs tape-recorded sound. In the Poème
électronique (1958), written for the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair, the sound was
intended to be distributed by 425 loudspeakers.

KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN
German composer
MUSIC STYLES: MODERN NATIONALISM
Karlheinz Stockhausen, (born Aug. 22, 1928,
Mödrath, near Cologne, Ger.—died Dec. 5, 2007,
Kürten), German composer. Orphaned during World
War II, he supported himself with odd jobs (including
jazz pianist) before entering Cologne’s State Academy
for Music in 1947. After hearing Olivier Messiaen’s
music at Darmstadt in 1951, he began studying with
the composer and experimenting with serialism. His
early works include Piano Pieces I–IV (1952)
and Counter-Points (1952–53). He also became
involved with musique concrète, a technique using
recorded sounds as raw material; his
remarkable Song of the Youths (1955–56) used a highly processed recording of a boy
soprano mixed with electronic sounds. His extensions of serialism continued in pieces
such as Measures (1955–56) and Groups (1955–57), and he became a leading avant-garde
spokesman. His Moments (1962–69) influentially applied serialism to groups of sounds
rather than single pitches, and he began incorporating aleatory (chance) elements as well.
From the late 1960s he conceived ever grander schemes, some incorporating literature,
dance, and ritual, as in the Light series (1977–2003).
 JOHN CAGE
MUSIC STYLE: CHANCE MUSIC
John Cage, in full John Milton Cage, Jr., (born September
5, 1912, Los Angeles, California, U.S.—died August 12,
1992, New York, New York), American avant-garde
composer whose inventive compositions and unorthodox
ideas profoundly influenced mid-20th-century music.

The son of an inventor, Cage briefly attended Pomona

College and then traveled in Europe for a time. Returning to
the United States in 1931, he studied music with Richard
Buhlig, Arnold Schoenberg, Adolph Weiss, and Henry
Cowell. While teaching in Seattle (1938–40), Cage organized
percussion ensembles to perform his compositions. He also experimented with works for dance, and his
subsequent collaborations with the choreographer and dancer Merce Cunningham sparked a long creative
and romantic partnership.

Cage’s early compositions were written in the 12-tone method of his teacher Schoenberg, but by 1939 he had
begun to experiment with increasingly unorthodox instruments such as the “prepared piano” (a piano modified
by objects placed between its strings in order to produce percussive and otherworldly sound effects). Cage also
experimented with tape recorders, record players, and radios in his effort to step outside the bounds of
conventional Western music and its concepts of meaningful sound. The concert he gave with his percussion
ensemble at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1943 marked the first step in his emergence as a
leader of the American musical avant-garde.

In the following years, Cage turned to Zen Buddhism and other Eastern philosophies and concluded that all the
activities that make up music must be seen as part of a single natural process. He came to regard all kinds of
sounds as potentially musical, and he encouraged audiences to take note of all sonic phenomena, rather than
only those elements selected by a composer. To this end he cultivated the principle of indeterminism in his
music. He used a number of devices to ensure randomness and thus eliminate any element of personal taste on
the part of the performer: unspecified instruments and numbers of performers, freedom of duration of sounds
and entire pieces, inexact notation, and sequences of events determined by random means such as by
consultation with the Chinese Yijing (I Ching). In his later works he extended these freedoms over other media,
so that a performance of HPSCHD (completed 1969) might include a light show, slide projections, and
costumed performers, as well as the 7 harpsichord soloists and 51 tape machines for which it was scored.

Among Cage’s best-known works are 4′33″ (Four Minutes and Thirty-three Seconds, 1952), a piece in which
the performer or performers remain utterly silent onstage for that amount of time (although the amount of time
is left to the determination of the performer); Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1951), for 12 randomly tuned radios,
24 performers, and conductor; the Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48) for prepared piano; Fontana Mix (1958), a
piece based on a series of programmed transparent cards that, when superimposed, give a graph for the random
selection of electronic sounds; Cheap Imitation (1969), an “impression” of the music of Erik Satie;
and Roaratorio (1979), an electronic composition utilizing thousands of words found in James Joyce’s
novel Finnegans Wake.

Cage published several books, including Silence: Lectures and Writings (1961) and M: Writings
’67–’72 (1973). His influence extended to such established composers as Earle Brown, Lejaren Hiller, Morton
Feldman, and Christian Wolff. More broadly, his work was recognized as significant in the development of
traditions ranging from minimalist and electronic music to performance art.
 ARNOLD SCHOENBERG
MUSIC STYLES: EXPRESSIONISM

Arnold Schoenberg, (born Sept. 13, 1874, Vienna,

Austro-Hungarian Empire—died July 13, 1951, Los
Angeles, Calif., U.S.), Austrian-born U.S. composer. He
was raised as a Catholic by his Jewish-born parents. He
began studying violin at age eight and later taught
himself cello. While working as a bank clerk, he studied
composition with Alexander Zemlinsky (1871–1942);
Schoenberg soon wrote his first string quartet (1897),
which was acclaimed. With Richard Strauss’s help he
obtained a teaching post in Berlin, but he soon returned
to Vienna, having composed his gigantic
cantata Gurrelieder (1901, orchestrated 1913). In
1904 Alban Berg and Anton Webern began their studies
with him, which would profoundly shape their later
artistic careers. About 1906 Schoenberg came to believe that tonality had to be abandoned.
During his subsequent period of “free atonality” (1907–16) he created remarkable works such
as the monodrama Erwartung (1909), Five Orchestral Pieces (1909), and Pierrot
lunaire (1912). From 1916 to 1923 he issued almost nothing, being occupied with teaching and
conducting but also seeking a way to organize atonality. He eventually developed the 12-tone
method (see serialism), in which each composition is formed from a special row or series of 12
different tones. In 1930 he began work on a three-act opera based on a single tone row; Moses
und Aron remained unfinished at his death. The rise of Nazism moved him to reassert his
Jewish faith and forced him to flee to the U.S., where he remained, teaching at the University of
California at Los Angeles (1936–44). Though never embraced by a broad public, he may have
exercised a greater influence on 20th-century music than any other composer.

IGOR STRAVINSKY

MUSIC STYLES: EXPRESSIONISM

Igor Stravinsky, (born June 17, 1882, Oranienbaum, Russia—died
April 6, 1971, New York, N.Y., U.S.), Russian-born U.S. composer.
Son of an operatic bass, he decided to be a composer at age 20 and
studied privately with Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov (1902–08).
His Fireworks (1908) was heard by the impresario Sergey
Diaghilev, who commissioned Stravinsky to write the Firebird ballet
(1910); its dazzling success made him Russia’s leading young
composer. The great ballet score Petrushka (1911) followed. His
next ballet, The Rite of Spring (1913), with its shifting and
audacious rhythms and its unresolved dissonances, was a landmark
in music history; its Paris premiere caused an actual riot in the
theatre, and Stravinsky’s international notoriety was assured. In the
early 1920s he adopted a radically different style of restrained
Neoclassicism—employing often ironic references to older music—
in works such as his Octet (1923). His major neoclassical works include Oedipus rex (1927) and
the Symphony of Psalms (1930) and culminate in the opera The Rake’s Progress (1951). From 1954 he
employed serialism, a compositional technique. His later works include Agon (1957)—the last of his many
ballets choreographed by George Balanchine—and Requiem Canticles (1966).
Music
Of the
th
20
Century