20th-century classical music

• 1. Introduction

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  20th-century classical music stands as the only era in Western art music's long history without a single dominant style. Between 1901 and 2000, composers fractured into more competing schools, techniques, and philosophies than any prior century had produced. Arnold Schoenberg abandoned tonality. Pierre Schaeffer built music from recorded noise. Terry Riley wrote a piece with no fixed ending. John Cage let chance decide the notes. How did the shared grammar of centuries dissolve so completely in just one hundred years? The answer starts in the concert halls of late 19th-century Europe, where the Romantic tradition was already straining at its seams.

• 2. The Break with Tonality

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  Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, and Jean Sibelius were still pressing post-Romantic symphonic writing to its outer limits when, in France, Claude Debussy was steering in an entirely different direction. Debussy resented the label applied to his work. He called Impressionism a term "as poorly used as possible, particularly by art critics", and described his own aim as trying to do something different, something he called "realities". His view of art was sensuous rather than intellectual; he urged French composers to look back to 18th-century masters who believed music should charm and entertain.

  In Vienna, Arnold Schoenberg took a sharper turn. His early scores were rooted in the late-Romantic style of Wagner and Brahms, but by 1909 he had written the Drei Klavierstücke, a set of pieces that abandoned traditional tonality altogether. Three years later came Pierrot lunaire. These works grew from the expressionist movement of the early 20th century, and they produced what the source describes as an unprecedented "linguistic plurality" of styles, techniques, and expression spreading outward from that first decisive break.

  Schoenberg spent several years in research before privately describing his twelve-tone technique to associates in 1923. His first large-scale work built entirely on the method was the Wind Quintet, Op. 26, written in 1923-24. The technique spread quickly. His students Anton Webern and Alban Berg each took it in a separate direction. Berg's Violin Concerto quoted a Bach chorale and used classical form even while employing the twelve-tone method. Later, even Scott Bradley used the technique in scores he wrote for the Tom and Jerry cartoons.

• 3. Neoclassicism and Primitivism

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  After the First World War, several composers turned away from both Romanticism and the new atonality by looking backward. Igor Stravinsky's Pulcinella, Sergei Prokofiev's Classical Symphony, Maurice Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin, Manuel de Falla's El retablo de maese Pedro, and Paul Hindemith's Symphony: Mathis der Maler all belong to this neoclassical impulse. The style sought to revive the balanced forms and clearly perceptible thematic processes of the 17th and 18th centuries, understood as a rejection of what were seen as exaggerated gestures in late Romanticism. Because the neoclassicists generally replaced the functional tonality of their models with extended tonality, modality, or atonality, the term often carries the suggestion of parody or distortion of Baroque and Classical style.

  Stravinsky and Prokofiev had earlier pursued something nearly opposite. In their early careers, both were drawn to primitivism, explored in works such as The Rite of Spring and Chout. The two impulses, one reaching back to the stately past and one reaching toward raw, elemental energy, coexisted as parallel reactions to the same post-Romantic saturation. Francis Poulenc's Concert champêtre and Stravinsky's Concerto in E-flat "Dumbarton Oaks" round out the neoclassical catalogue named in the source, with Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin sometimes described as neo-baroque, a term borrowed from architecture.

• 4. Futurism, Noise, and Machine Music

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  In 1909, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti founded Futurism as an Italian artistic movement, and the Russian avant-garde quickly adopted it. In 1913, the painter Luigi Russolo published a manifesto titled L'arte dei rumori, The Art of Noises, calling for every kind of noise to be incorporated into music. Italian composers Silvio Mix, Nuccio Fiorda, Franco Casavola, and a composer identified as Pannigi joined the movement; Pannigi's 1922 Ballo meccanico included two motorcycles. Russian composers Artur Lourié, Mikhail Matyushin, and Nikolai Roslavets were also directly associated with it.

  Few of those futurist works are performed today, but the movement's influence on later 20th-century music was, by the source's account, enormous. George Antheil's "Machine Music" began with his Second Sonata, The Airplane; Alexander Mosolov contributed his Iron Foundry. The features that futurism seeded into later practice include the prepared piano, integral serialism, extended vocal techniques, graphic notation, improvisation, and minimalism. Charles Ives, Julián Carrillo, Alois Hába, John Foulds, Ivan Wyschnegradsky, Harry Partch, and Mildred Couper all pushed further still by working with microtones, intervals smaller than a semitone. Human voices and unfretted strings can produce microtones with relative ease, but the piano and organ have no mechanism for them at all without retuning or reconstruction.

• 5. Electronic and Chance Music

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  Pierre Schaeffer's work in the 1940s and 50s applied recording technology to composition. When the source material was acoustical sounds from the everyday world, the result was called musique concrète; when sounds came from electronic generators, it was designated electronic music. Beginning in 1957, computers entered the field. The broader category of electroacoustic music eventually covered music involving magnetic tape, computers, synthesizers, multimedia, and other electronic devices. Edgard Varèse's Déserts from 1954, Karlheinz Stockhausen's Hymnen from 1969, Claude Vivier's Wo bist du Licht! from 1981, and Mario Davidovsky's series of Synchronisms, running from 1963 to 2006, are named in the source as notable works that combined electronic sounds with conventional instruments.

  John Cage introduced elements of chance into his music from the early 1950s onwards. His Imaginary Landscape No. 4 was written for twelve radio receivers. His Sonatas and Interludes, composed between 1946 and 1948, used a prepared piano: a normal instrument whose timbre is altered by placing objects in contact with the strings. Cage coined the term experimental music to describe works that produce unpredictable results, defining an experimental action as "one the outcome of which is not foreseen". Karlheinz Stockhausen's Prozession and Aus den sieben Tagen, and Steve Reich's Piano Phase and Clapping Music, are grouped under the related category of process music, in which a particular process is essentially laid bare in the work itself.

• 6. Minimalism

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  Terry Riley's In C, from 1964, offers one of the clearest early maps of minimalism. In it, musicians choose short phrases from a set list and play each an arbitrary number of times, while the note C is repeated in eighth notes behind them. The piece has no fixed ending and no conductor in the conventional sense.

  Steve Reich's Piano Phase from 1967, written for two pianos, and Drumming from 1970-71, for percussion, female voices, and piccolo, developed the technique of phasing: one player holds a constant pace while another plays the same phrase at a slightly quicker tempo, gradually going out of phase until the two come back together. Reich described Drumming as the final expansion and refinement of the phasing process and identified four techniques appearing for the first time in it: gradually substituting beats for rests, gradually changing timbre while rhythm and pitch stay constant, combining instruments of different timbre simultaneously, and using the human voice to imitate the exact sound of instruments.

  Philip Glass's 1 + 1 from 1968 employed an additive process in which short phrases slowly expand. La Monte Young's Compositions 1960 used very long tones, exceptionally high volumes, and instructions such as "draw a straight line and follow it" or "build a fire". Michael Nyman's argument, as cited in the source, was that minimalism was made possible by both serialism and indeterminism. La Monte Young, Arvo Pärt, Philip Glass, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and John Adams are the composers the source groups as the central minimalist figures of the later 20th century.

• 7. Politics, Nationalism, and Jazz

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  Dmitri Shostakovich worked within the constraints of socialist realism in the Soviet Union, navigating the social impact of communism through his music. Benjamin Britten's War Requiem and the work of Michael Tippett engaged with political themes at the composers' own volition rather than under state mandate.

  Nationalism shaped a distinct American strand of classical music, heard in the works of Charles Ives, John Alden Carpenter, and George Gershwin. Jazz and folk music fed into this current as well. Vaughan Williams drew on English folk material in Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus; Gustav Holst wrote A Somerset Rhapsody. Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, and Darius Milhaud's La création du monde each absorbed jazz into the concert hall. Milhaud, Aaron Copland, Malcolm Arnold, Maurice Ravel, Gunther Schuller, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Igor Stravinsky all produced works named in the source that combined jazz idioms with classical compositional methods. Nikolai Kapustin's Twenty-Four Preludes for piano, Op. 53, dates to 1988 and appears in the same category. Composers from non-Western cultures, including Toru Takemitsu, and jazz musicians including Duke Ellington, Gil Evans, Art Tatum, and Cecil Taylor were themselves shaped by the impressionist musical language, a reminder that the century's cross-pollination ran in both directions. The music of John Adams, one of the minimalists listed in the source, carries that same merging of classical structure with vernacular energy into the final decades of the century.