20th and 21st Centuries

Arnold Schoenberg

(1874-1951). This Austrian pioneered dodecaphony, or the twelve-tone system, which treated all parts of the chromatic scale equally. His early influences were Wagner and R. Strauss, as evident in his Transfigured Night (1900) for strings. Yet by 1912, with the "Sprechstimme" (halfway between singing and speaking) piece Pierrot lunaire, he broke from Romanticism and developed expressionist pieces free from key or tone. His students, especially Alban Berg and Anton Webern, further elaborated on his theories. Fleeing Nazi persecution in 1933, he moved from Berlin to Los Angeles, where he completed A Survivor from Warsaw. The first two acts of his unfinished opera, Moses und Aron, are still frequently performed.

Béla Bartók

(1881-1945): He was born in Hungary. He spent most of his free time in tiny villages recording peasant folksongs. He became a leading authority on peasant music, and his own music was profoundly affected by it.

Igor Stravinsky

(1882-1971); Russian; later lived in France and America; While not particularly known in Russia, he moved to Paris; Made his big break writing music for Ballet Russes; One of the 2 most influential composers of modern music

Aaron Copland

(1900-1990). American composer for screen, stage, and concert hall

Dmitri Shostakovich

(1906-1975). His work was emblematic of both the Soviet regime and his attempts to survive under its oppression. Shostakovich's operas, such as The Nose (1928) and Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, were well received at first--until Stalin severely criticized his work in Pravda in 1936. Fearful for his security, Shostakovich wrote several conciliatory pieces (Fifth, Seventh/Leningrad, and Twelfth Symphonies) in order to get out of trouble. He made enemies, however, with his Thirteenth Symphony (Babi Yar). Based on the Yevtushenko poem, Babi Yar condemned anti-Semitism in both Nazi Germany and the USSR.

Elliot Carter

(1908-2012) American composer, studied with Nadia Boulanger, used metric modulation, known for cello sonata and night fantasies as well as several string quartets

Benjamin Britten

(1913-1976), British (moved to USA but came back soon after, toured a bit in USA,) started young, wrote pieces for every medium and difficulty, wrote "The Young Person's Guide to Orchestra"

Gebrauchsmusik

(German "utilitarian music" or "music for use") Term from the 1920s to describe music that was socially relevant and useful, especially music for amateurs, children, or workers to play or sing.

Klangfarbenmelodie

(German, 'tone-color melody') Term coined by Arnold Schoenberg to describe a succession of tone colors that is perceived as analogous to the changing pitches in a melody.

George Crumb

(b. 1929) American composer of avant garde music, created sounds with instruments and objects. Black Angels, interested in numerology, right vs. wrong

Claude Debussy

1862-1918 French composer. One of the most important musicians of his time, his harmonic innovations had a profound influence on generations of composers. He made a decisive move away from Wagnerism in his only complete opera Pelléas et Mélisande, and in his works for piano and for orchestra he created new genres and revealed a range of timbre and colour which indicated a highly original musical aesthetic.

Erik Satie

1866-1925 French composer. Precursor to Debussy

Charles Ives

1874-1954 American composer. His music is marked by an integration of American and European musical traditions, innovations in rhythm, harmony, and form, and an unparalleled ability to evoke the sounds and feelings of American life. He is regarded as the leading American composer of art music of the early 20th century.

Maurice Ravel

1875-1937 French composer. He was one of the most original and sophisticated musicians of the early 20th century. His instrumental writing - whether for solo piano, for ensemble or for orchestra - explored new possibilities, which he developed at the same time as (or even before) his great contemporary Debussy, and his fascination with the past and with the exotic resulted in music of a distinctively French sensibility and refinement.

Anton Webern

1883-1945 Austrian composer and conductor. Webern, who was probably Schoenberg's first private pupil, and Alban Berg, who came to him a few weeks later, were the most famous of Schoenberg's students and became, with him, the major exponents of the 12-note technique in the second quarter of the 20th century. Webern applied the new technique more rigorously than either Schoenberg, who took many liberties, or Berg, who never used it exclusively. Webern's strictness, and his innovative organization of rhythm and dynamics, were seized upon eagerly by Boulez and Stockhausen and other integral serialists of the Darmstadt School in the 1950s and were a significant influence on music in the second half of the century.

Edgard Varèse

1883-1965 American composer of French birth. He produced in the 1920s a series of compositions which were innovative and influential in their rhythmic complexity, use of percussion, free atonality and forms not principally dependent on harmonic progression or thematic working. Even before World War I he saw the necessity of new means to realize his conceptions of 'organized sound' (the term he preferred to 'music'), and, seizing on the electronic developments after World War II, he composed two of the first major works with sounds on tape.

Paul Hindemith

1895-1963 German composer, theorist, teacher, viola player and conductor. The foremost German composer of his generation, he was a figure central to both music composition and musical thought during the inter-war years.

William Grant Still

1895-1978; used folk and traditional sounds; african american; symphony-1st composed by black

Henry Cowell

1897-1965 American composer, writer, pianist, publisher, and teacher. Described by Cage as "the open sesame for new music in America," he was an early advocate for many of the main developments in 20th-century music, including the systematization of modernist techniques, the exploration of timbral resources, and transculturalism.

George Gershwin

1898-1937 American composer, pianist, and conductor. He began his career as a song plugger in New York's Tin Pan Alley; by the time he was 20 he had established himself as a composer of Broadway shows, and by age 30 he was America's most famous and widely accepted composer of concert music as well as a leading songwriter.

Francis Poulenc

1899-1963 French composer and pianist. During the first half of his career the simplicity and directness of his writing led many critics away from thinking of him as a serious composer. Gradually, since World War II, it has become clear that the absence from his music of linguistic complexity in no way argues a corresponding absence of feeling or technique

Kurt Weill

1900-1950 German composer, American citizen from 1943. He was one of the outstanding composers in the generation that came to maturity after World War I, and a key figure in the development of modern forms of musical theatre. His successful and innovatory work for Broadway during the 1940s was a development in more popular terms of the exploratory stage works that had made him the foremost avant-garde theatre composer of the Weimar Republic.

Olivier Messiaen

1908-1992 French composer, organist, and teacher.

Milton Babbitt

1916-2011 American composer and theorist. He contributed extensively to the understanding and extension of 12-tone compositional theory and practice and was one of the most influential composers and teachers in the United States since World War II.

Iannis Xenakis

1922-2001 French composer of Greek parentage. He belonged to the pioneering generation of composers who revolutionized 20th-century music after World War II. With the ardour of an outsider to academic musical life, he was one of the first to replace traditional musical thinking with radical new concepts of sound composition. His musical language had a strong influence on many younger composers in and outside of Europe, but it remained singular for its uncompromising harshness and conceptual rigour.

György Ligeti

1923-2006 Hungarian composer. , He was suspicious of system, rejoiced in the delightfulness and evocativeness of sound, and steadily reintroduced—though in quite new ways, guided by an exact ear—things that serial orthodoxy had refused, such as simple harmonies, ostinatos and palpable melodies

Luciano Berio

1925-2003 Italian composer. At a relatively early stage in his career, he succeeded in transcending the closed world of the European avant garde to address a wider public. The vivid, gestural idiom that he developed in the 1960s, and the creative consequences that he drew from other, often extra-musical aspects of the culture around him, established for him a world-wide reputation that sustained his subsequent exploration of a wide, and sometimes challenging, arc of musical resources. Of formidable creative energy, he proved one of the most prolific composers of the later 20th century. Berio's long-established status as the leading Italian composer of his generation remains secure.

Pierre Boulez

1925-2016 French composer and conductor. Resolute imagination, force of will, and ruthless combativeness secured him, as a young man, a position at the head of the Parisian musical avant garde. His predecessors, in his view, had not been radical enough; music awaited a combination of Serialism with the rhythmic irregularity opened up by Igor Stravinsky and Olivier Messiaen. This call for a renewed modernism was widely heard and widely followed during the 1950s, but its appeal gradually weakened thereafter, and in the same measure his creativity waned.

Karlheinz Stockhausen

1928-2007 German composer. The leading German composer of his generation, he was a seminal figure of the post-1945 avant garde. A tireless innovator and influential teacher, he largely redefined notions of serial composition, and was a pioneer in electronic music. His seven-part operatic cycle Licht is possibly the most ambitious project ever undertaken by a major composer.

Krzysztof Penderecki

1933-2020 Polish composer and conductor. He first came to prominence as an explorer of novel string textures and for many years his name was popularly synonymous with avant-garde Polish music. His subsequent allusions to 18th- and 19th-century idioms and genres, in his choral and operatic works as well as in his purely instrumental pieces, has produced a substantial body of work which challenges many assumptions about the nature and purpose of contemporary music.

Alfred Schnittke

1934-1998, wrote Concerto Gross no. 1 (1977), Russian composer that wrote in a wide range of genres and styles. He scored over 60 films by 1984.

John Tavener

1944-2013. English. Music centered on spiritual concerns. Sacred choral works in a harmonically simple, chant-derived idiom. Transferred those concepts to instrumental eventually

pitch-class set

A collection of pitch-classes that preserves its identity when transposed, inverted, or reordered and used melodically or harmonically.

social realism

A doctrine of the Soviet Union, begun in the 1930s, in which all the arts were required to use a realistic approach (as opposed to an abstract or symbolic one) that portrayed socialism in a positive light. In music this meant use of simple, accessible language, centered on melody, and patriotic subject matter

twelve-tone (or, dodecaphonic) method

A form of atonal music based on the systematic ordering of the twelve notes of the chromatic scale into a row that may be manipulated according to certain rules

palindrome

A piece or passage in which a Retrograde follows the original (or 'model') from which it is derived. The retrograde normally follows the original directly. The term 'palindrome' may be applied exclusively to the retrograde itself, provided that the original preceded it.

swing

A style of jazz originating in the 1930s that was characterized by large ensembles and hard-driving jazz rhythms.

postmodernism

A term, American in origin, widely used from the late 1970s onwards, with a broad range of meanings. Some come from multiple associations with 'modern' and 'modernist', others from disagreement over what the prefix 'post' implies about the 'modern' - contestation or extension, difference or dependence - and whether postmodernism is a regressive or progressive force.

neo-Romanticism

A trend of the late twentieth century in which composers adopted the familiar tonal idiom of nineteenth-century Romantic music and incorporated its sounds and gestures.

post-minimalism

A type of 1980s experimental art-music that uses minimalist aspects as well as influences from orchestral music, big-band jazz, and rock.

jazz

A type of music developed mostly by African Americans in the early part of the twentieth century that combined elements of African, popular, and European music, and that has evolved into a broad tradition encompassing many styles.

Sprechstimme

A vocal style in which the melody is spoken at approximate pitches rather than sung on exact pitches; developed by Arnold Schoenberg.

John Cage

American composer. One of the leading figures of the postwar avant garde. The influence of his compositions, writings and personality has been felt by a wide range of composers around the world. He had a greater impact on music in the 20th century than any other American composer.

rhythm and blues

An American pop music style popular between the 1940's and 1960's.played by an ensemble, generally with a lead vocalist or instrumentalist, a rhythm section, and an ensemble of voices, wind instruments, or guitar.

indeterminacy

An approach to composition, pioneered by John Cage, in which the composer leaves certain aspects of the music unspecified. Should not be confused with chance.

octatonic scale

An eight-note scale (used by Stravinsky and others) consisting of half and whole steps in alternation.

prepared piano

An invention of John Cage in which various objects-such as pennies, bolts, screws, or pieces of wood, rubber, plastic, or slit bamboo-are inserted between the strings of a piano, resulting in complex percussive sounds when the piano is played from the keyboard.

Chance Music (Aleatoric Music)

Approach to composing music pioneered by John Cage, in which some of the decisions normally made by the composer are instead determined through random procedures, such as tossing coins. Chance differs from indeterminance but shares with it the result that the sounds in the music do not convey an intention and are therefore to be experienced only as pure sound.

Alban Berg

Austrian composer. Along with his teacher Arnold Schoenberg and fellow pupil Anton Webern in the years before and immediately after World War I, he moved away from tonality to write free atonal and then 12-note music. At once a modernist and a Romantic, a formalist and a sensualist, he produced one of the richest bodies of music in the 20th century, and in opera, especially, he had few equals.

quotation

Direct borrowing of one work in another, especially when the borrowed material is not reworked using a standard musical procedure (such as variations, paraphrase, or imitation mass) but is set off as a foreign element.

expressionism

Early-twentieth-century term derived from art, in which music avoids all traditional forms of "beauty" in order to express deep personal feelings through exaggerated gestures, angular melodies, and extreme dissonance.

post-tonal music

General term for music after 1900 that does not adhere to tonality but instead uses any of the new ways that composers found to organize pitch, from atonality to neotonality.

impressionism

Late nineteenth-century term derived from art, used for music that evokes moods and visual images through colorful harmony and instrumental timbre

electronic music

Music based on sounds that are produced or modified through electronic means.

serialism

Music composed in the twelve-tone method; used especially for music that extends the same general approach to series in parameters other than pitch.

film music

Music that serves as either background or foreground for a film

polytonal music

Music using two (or more) keys at the same time. Music with more than one tonal center

pop music

Music, primarily intended as entertainment, that is sold in printed or recorded form. It is distinguished from folk music by being written down and marketed as a commodity, and from classical music by being centered on the performer and not the performance, allowing great latitude in rearranging the notated music.

Second Viennese School

Name given to composer Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils Alban Berg and Anton Webern; represents the first efforts in twelve-tone composition.

principle of nonrepetition

One of the characteristic features of a melodic theme in tonal music is, after all, the order assigned to its pitches, but this feature is inseparable from others - rhythm, contour, tonal functions - any and all of which may be varied within certain limits without destroying the identity of the theme. The interdependence and interaction of these elements are far more ambiguous and problematical in atonality.

minimalism

One of the leading musical styles of the late twentieth century, in which materials are reduced to a minimum and procedures simplified so that what is going on in the music is immediately apparent. Often characterized by a constant pulse and many repetitions of simple RHYTHMIC, MELODIC, or HARMONIC patterns.

emancipation of dissonance

Schoenberg concept that the liberation of dissonances from the necessity of resolution, merely means that the specific difference between consonances and dissonances, which gave rise to the dependence of dissonances on consonances, has been abolished, and not that chords no longer possess varying degrees of consonance and dissonance with which the composer can work

developing variation

Term coined by Arnold Schoenberg for the process of deriving new themes, accompaniments, and other ideas throughout a piece through variations of a germinal idea.

tone clusters

Term coined by Henry Cowell for a chord of diatonic or chromatic seconds.

New Objectivity

Term coined in the 1920s to describe a kind of new realism in music, in reaction to the emotional intensity of the late Romantics and the expressionism of Schoenberg and Berg

avant garde

Term for music (and art) that is iconoclastic, irreverent, antagonistic, and nihilistic, seeking to overthrow established aesthetics.

atonality

Term for music that avoids establishing a central pitch or tonal center

chromatic saturation

The appearance of all twelve pitch-classes within a segment of music.

neoclassicism

Trend in music from the 1910s to the 1950s in which composers revived, imitated, or evoked the styles, genres, and forms of pre-Romantic music, especially those of the eighteenth century.

big band

Type of large jazz ensemble popular between the world wars, featuring brass, reeds, and rhythm sections, and playing prepared arrangements that included rhythmic unisons and coordinated dialogue between sections and soloists.

collage

Work or passage that uses multiple quotations without following a standard procedure for doing so, such as quodlibet or medley.

Ballets Russes

a Russian ballet company established in 1909 by the Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev. Infamous for Rites of Spring.

Broadway music / musical theatre

a form of theatrical performance that combines songs, spoken dialogue, acting and dance. The story and emotional content of a musical - humor, pathos, love, anger - are communicated through words, music, movement and technical aspects of the entertainment as an integrated whole. Although musical theatre overlaps with other theatrical forms like opera and dance, it may be distinguished by the equal importance given to the music as compared with the dialogue, movement and other elements.

Sofia Gubaidulina

b. 1931 Soviet woman composer whose works often suggest a spiritual dimension, a trend found in many Eastern European composers' music from the 1970s forward.

Arvo Pärt

b. 1935 An Estonian composer who uses the Renaissance period style and uses silence in his music. Spiritual minimalism.

Steve Reich

b. 1936 American composer. One of the first masters of the repetitive music that emerged in New York in the mid-1960s and was soon branded 'minimalism', he has consistently broadened and developed his musical world without compromising the streamlined efficiency and precision of his technique. Repetitive, pulse-driven figures have remained a characteristic, but so have the slips and leaps of a lively mind.

Philip Glass

b. 1937. American composer. Philip Glass is considered one of the founding figures of minimalist music.

Ellen Taaffe Zwillich

b. 1939 -Writes eclectic music. -Concerto Grosso (1985) blends baroque and modern elements, and has a third movement based on a melody by Handel. -First woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for music

John Adams

b. 1947 American composer and conductor. Known particularly for his operatic works on contemporary subjects, he is considered one of the most frequently performed living composers of concert music.

musique concrète

music in which the composer works directly with sounds recorded on magnetic tape, not with musical notation and performers

Les Six

six French composers of the 1920s whose music reflected the strong influence of popular styles Auric, Durey, Honegger, Milhaud, Poulenc, Tailleferre

parlando-rubato

term coined by Bartok to describe a style of European folk singing that included the stressing of the words, departs frequently from strict metric and rhythmic patterns and is often highly ornamented

total serialism

the application of the principles of the twelve-tone method to musical parameters other than pitch, including duration, intensities, and timbres

formalism

the concept that a composition's meaning is entirely determined by its form.

twelve-bar blues

three four-bar phrases, aab or abc pattern, most commonly I/I/I/I/IV/IV/I/I/V/IV/I/I