Musopen: Music History: Romantic

20th century (contemporary) classical music
20th century classical music, the classical music of the 20th century, was extremely diverse, beginning with the late Romantic style of Sergei Rachmaninoff and the Impressionism of Claude Debussy, and ranging to such distant sound-worlds as the complete serialism of Pierre Boulez, the simple triadic harmonies of minimalist composers such as Steve Reich, and Philip Glass, the musique concrète of Pierre Schaeffer, the microtonal music adopted by Harry Partch, Alois Hába and others, and the aleatoric music of John Cage.

Among the most prominent composers of the 20th century were Béla Bartók, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Giacomo Puccini, Claude Debussy, Charles Ives, Edward Elgar, Arnold Schoenberg, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Sergei Prokofiev, Igor Stravinsky, Dmitri Shostakovich, Benjamin Britten, Aaron Copland and Carl Nielsen. Classical music also had an intense cross fertilization with jazz, with several composers being able to work in both genres, including George Gershwin. An important feature of 20th century concert music is the existence of the splitting of the audience into traditional and avant-garde, with many figures prominent in one world considered minor or unacceptable in the other. Composers such as Anton von Webern, Elliot Carter, Edgard Varèse, Milton Babbitt, and Luciano Berio have devoted followings within the avant-garde, but are often attacked outside of it. As time has passed, however, it is increasingly accepted, though by no means universally so, that the boundaries are more porous than the many polemics would lead one to believe: many of the techniques pioneered by the above composers show up in popular music by The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Mike Oldfield, Nirvana, Radiohead and in film scores that draw mass audiences.

Romantic style - Extension
Particularly in the early part of the century, many composers wrote music which was an extension of 19th century Romantic music. Harmony, though sometimes complex, was tonal, and traditional instrumental groupings such as the orchestra and string quartet remained the most usual. Traditional forms such as the symphony and concerto remained in use. (See Romantic Music)

Many prominent composers — among them Dmitri Kabalevsky, Dmitri Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten — made significant advances in style and technique while still employing a melodic, harmonic, structural and textural language which was related to that of the 19th century and quite accessible to the average listener.

Music along these lines was written throughout the 20th century, and continues to be written today. Some other twentieth-century composers of works in a more-or-less-traditional idiom include:

    * Samuel Barber
    * Leonard Bernstein
    * Aaron Copland
    * John Corigliano
    * George Gershwin
    * Henryk Górecki
    * Howard Hanson
    * Roy Harris
    * Alan Hovhaness
    * Gustav Holst
    * Aram Khachaturian
    * Colin McPhee
    * Sergei Rachmaninoff
    * Jean Sibelius
    * Ralph Vaughan Williams

Minimalist composers such as Philip Glass can also be said to evoke some sense of nineteenth-century melodic and harmonic language, but depart radically in structure and texture, harmony, ideas, development, counterpoint and rhythm.

Modernism
Modernism is the name given to a series of movements (See Modernism) arising out of the idea that the 20th century presented a new basis for society and activity, and therefore art should adopt this new basis, however construed, as the fundamental of aesthetics. Modernism took the progressive spirit of the late 19th century, its love of rigor and of technical advancement, and unhinged it from the norms and forms of late 19th century art. To take one example, architect Frank Lloyd Wright did his drafting work with tools, not because he could not draw freehand, but because "the machine was the coming thing, therefore I wanted to make beauty with the machine". Various movements in 20th century music, including neo-classicism, serialism, experimentalism, and conceptualism can be traced to this idea.

The "Second Viennese School", atonality and serialism
Arnold Schoenberg is one of the most significant figures in 20th century music. His early works are in a late Romantic style, influenced by Richard Wagner and Gustav Mahler, but he later abandoned a tonal framework altogether, instead writing freely atonal music - he is often reckoned to have been the first composer to have done so. In time, he developed the twelve-tone technique of composition, intended to be a replacement for traditional tonal pitch organization. His pupils Anton Webern and Alban Berg also developed and furthered the use of the twelve-tone system and were notable for their use of the technique in their own right. They together are known, colloquially, as the Schoenberg "trinity" or the Second Viennese School. This name was created to imply that this "New Music" would have the same effect as the "First Viennese School" of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.

Schoenberg's music and that of his followers was very controversial in its day, and remains so to some degree now. Many listeners found, and still find, his music hard to follow, lacking a sense of definite melody. Nonetheless, works such as Pierrot Lunaire continue to be performed, studied and listened to, while many of the contemporary works which were considered more acceptable have been forgotten. A larger measure of the reason for this is that the style he pioneered was very influential, even among composers who continued to compose tonal music. Many composers have since written music which does not rely on traditional tonality.

Neoclassicism
Neo-classicism, in music, means the movement in the 20th century to return to a revived "common practice" harmony, mixed with greater dissonance and rhythm, as the basic point of departure for music. Igor Stravinsky, Paul Hindemith, Sergei Prokofiev and Béla Bartók are usually listed as the most important composers in this mode, but also the prolific Darius Milhaud and his contemporary Francis Poulenc.

Neo-classicism was born at the same time as the general return to rational models in the arts in response to World War I. Smaller, more spare, more orderly was conceived of as the response to the overwrought emotionalism which many felt had herded people into the trenches. Since economics also favored smaller ensembles, the search for doing "more with less" took on a practical imperative as well. Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat is thought of as a seminal "neo-classical piece", as are his Dumbarton Oaks Concerto and his "Symphonies of Wind Instruments", as well as his Symphony in C. Stravinsky's neo-classicism culminated with his opera Rake's Progress, with the book done by the well known modernist poet, W. H. Auden.

Stravinsky's rival for a time in neo-classicism was the German Paul Hindemith, who mixed spiky dissonance, polyphony and free ranging chromaticism into a style which was "useful". He produced both chamber works and orchestral works in this style, perhaps most famously "Mathis der Maler". His chamber output includes his Sonata for French Horn, an expressionistic work filled with dark detail and internal connections.

Minimalism
Many composers in the later 20th century began to explore what is now called minimalism. The most specific definition of minimalism refers to the dominance of process in music — where fragments are layered on top of each other, often looped, to produce the entirety of the sonic canvas. Early examples include Terry Riley's In C and Steve Reich's Drumming. Riley is seen by some as the "father" of minimalist music with In C, a work comprised of melodic cells that each performer in an ensemble plays through at their own rate. The minimalist wave of composers — Terry Riley, Mike Oldfield, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and La Monte Young to name the most prominent — wanted music to be "accessible" to ordinary listeners, and wanted to express concrete specific questions of dramatic and music form, not hidden in layers of technique, but very overtly. One key difference between minimalism and previous music is the use of different cells being "out of phase" or determined by the performers; contrast this with the opening of Das Rheingold by Richard Wagner which, despite its use of triadic cells, has each part controlled by the same impulse and moving at the same speed.

Electronic music
Technological advances in the 20th century enabled composers to use electronic means of producing sound. This took several forms: some composers simply incorporated electronic instruments into relatively conventional pieces. Olivier Messiaen, for example, used the ondes martenot in a number of works.