Between 1900 and 1999, artists from Elgar and Britten to Stravinsky, Gershwin, and John Williams pioneered a broad spectrum of musical genres inspired by the history of music in the 20th century. The recording of classical and jazz music was made possible because of technological advances, which paved the way for internationally renowned musicians like Pavarotti and Maria Callas (Music 2020). The volatile political environment, advancements in innovation, and significant chnges in style significantly impacted music throughout the twentieth century. New forms and genres of music were created by composers who could not continue to build on the theme of previous generations.
In the middle of the 20th century, Europe was rocked by a series of massive political events. To avoid persecution, Shostakovich had to produce symphonies for those in power and other pieces such as string quartets that were loyal to his voice since his music was considered too “modern” or “élitist” by the Soviet authority. Composers who emerged after war felt compelled to abandon the past behind them and experiment with ever more innovative approaches due to the World War II (Music 2020).
American artists such as George Gershwin and Duke Ellington started to inspire their national music – jazz – in their compositions. Stravinsky and Ravel replied with music that comprised elements of jazz in their designs. Vaughan Williams, Bartók, and Messiaen were all inspired by folk music, which was also a tremendous source of inspiration for other composers. Modernism in music was defined by the desire to be radical and unusual. For the first time, operators and listeners realized that music did not have to be restricted to traditional forms, but by 1960, this notion had lost its luster and was no longer popular (Music 2020). The coming generation of “serious” musicians and artists could relax and create with a more diverse palette of musical colors, including influences from various cultures, popular music, ancient music, and modernism’s experimentation with form and formlessness. Simplicity was supported by musicians like Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Michael Nyman, and John Adams, who broke down musical barriers and attained widespread appeal as a result (Music 2020). Their works and efforts in music portrays the advancements in music and innovation – sometimes incorporating parts of jazz and rock – and reflects this. The leading British exponents of “post-modern” music are composed of composers who met while pursuing their education in Manchester. Peter Maxwell Davies, Harrison Birtwistle, and Alexander Goehr’s music may not be for everyone, but it has the potential to be profoundly moving and engaging. In the latter half of the twentieth century, film and video game soundtracks gained popularity, with E.T., Star Wars, Harry Potter, and The Lord of the Rings among the most well-known (Music 2020).
The 20th century might be characterized as the “Age of Extremes.” On the one hand, the period was marked by disgusting misfortunes, such as two world wars, the systematic killing of millions of individuals, biological, and atomic weapons, and terror activities. The period was marked by unspeakable tragedies, such as the Holocaust and the Holocaust of the Jews. On the other hand, scientific advancements have considerably increased both the quality and the duration of human life throughout time. Antibiotics, organ transplants, and vaccinations are just a few of the medical breakthroughs that have saved countless lives. The advancement of technology has also had an impact on our musical culture. The twentieth century saw steady improvements in recording and playback technology, culminating in the inventions of the LP record, magnetic tape, compact disc, and MP3 file, which have made famous and classical music accessible to large segments of the population as the invention of the internet. Because of the low cost of music reproduction and transmission, both the affluent and the poor enjoyed high-quality music in approximately equal quantities.
On the other hand, these advancements have not been without a price, and they may have hindered musical instruction and music creation in the home. As you can see, the twentieth century was a period in which recording and broadcasting altered the economics and social interactions fundamental in music. Music was primarily created by individuals in the nineteenth century, with many attending concerts to get firsthand knowledge. One might listen to the radio, watch television and, subsequently, download digital music if one lived in an industrialized country: What’s the point of learning to play an instrument when you can just listen to music on a portable device, you may think.
Music from 1900-1945
When composers started turning away from the warm sentimentality of most 19th-century music, they replaced it with a harsh and percussive tone that was impersonal. Dissonant harmonies and angular melodies were introduced. The early 20th century saw a rise in the use of dissonance, uneasiness, and even hysteria as appropriate creative expressions amid the world’s most devastating natural disasters. Gustav Mahler’s Symphony of 1000 from 1906 is possibly the clearest example of the large masterpieces of the late Romantic era that gave way to more minor, less lavish works.
From the late 1600s until about 1900, several general rules regulated music organization. The underlying strategies of arranging imagery around a center tone may be different in the works of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, yet they are fundamentally similar. Since 1900, there has been no singular system governing pitch structure in all musical works. The pitch connections of each piece are more likely to be unique (Arnheim, R., 1997 pp, 405).
Arnold Schonberg’s rigorous 12-tone music best exemplifies the abstract, impersonal nature of contemporary music. the decade of the sixties In response to Schonberg and his adherents, musical postmodernism grew in popularity, allowing for a wide range of musical genres, such as electronic music and chance music, to be performed in unorthodox ways. Postmodernism, which began in the 1980s and continues to this day, typically abandons all conventional musical structures and methods (Arnheim, R., 1997 pp, 40).
Music Diversity
There was a lot of artistic variety and dispute in the early twentieth century. The gigantic symphonies of Gustav Mahler were written in an essentially Romantic idiom during this period. In contrast, the impressionist works of Claude Debussy, for example, were an early French precursor to modernism. In the early twentieth century, classically trained musicians did not shun the conventions of the art form. Opera, ballet, symphony, concerto, and a string quartet were all preserved. Only the most forward-thinking composers used new, frightening methods of expression in these genres to create new sorts of melody and harmony, rhythm, and tone color. People who identified as progressive eschewed the idea that music should only be pleasant to listen to and communicate one’s thoughts and feelings. To shock their listeners, they distorted established musical conventions, sometimes brutally. The discordant chords and hammering rhythms of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring triggered a riot in Paris in 1913 when it was performed for the first time. Many of the avant-garde composers’ goal was to jolt listeners out of their complacency and bring them back to the harsh realities of everyday life.
Early twentieth-century artists, like musicians, added severe distortions to their works, disturbing middle-class sensibilities in the same way. In art, a movement known as Cubism mirrored the new music’s more angular melody and disjointed meter. As in Pablo Picasso’s masterpiece Friendship (1907), the artist breaks and dislocates formal reality into geometrical blocks and planes, and the human form has been remade into interlocking forms. Stravinsky seems to be Picasso’s musical equivalent. The two pals had a mutual admiration for one other’s work and worked on a few occasions. Although not an accomplished painter, Schoenberg was inspired by German Expressionist artists who twisted the formal reality of their paintings to such an extent that the items they depicted could hardly be recognized (Arnheim, R., 1997 pp, 405). Early modernist music and avant-garde art lost their classic, singable melodies and conventional figures. Many early 20th century melodies have an angular and fragmented aspect that may be noticed in current art. For example, three Musicians (1921) by Picasso has shattered and jumbled figures. Compare Arnold Schoenberg’s disjunct music to this disjunct technique to painting.
The music of the twentieth century, on the other hand, introduced a new level of freedom and experimentation with previously unheard-of musical genres and forms. Music was forever changed and expanded with the advent of electric and synthesizer instruments in the mid-20th century. In other cases, Eastern, Middle Eastern, Latin, and Western sounds started to blend and cohabit. In the early 1900s, chords, rhythms, and percussion sounds that baffled people began to be used in jazz, rock, and television soundtracks. Fans and performers alike were able to travel more extensively to see and hear music from other countries because of more efficient ways of transportation.
In the music of the twentieth century, these revolutionary shifts may be heard clearly. In Edgar Varèse’s “Ionization,” for example, we can see the importance of percussive instruments, as well as the occasional usage of noisemakers. It was also possible to apply other methods of chord combining and structure construction. A 12-tone series, for example, maybe found in Arnold Schoenberg’s Piano Suite, Op. 25. Even the meter, rhythm, and melody were unexpected. As a result, metric modulations (or tempo modulations) provide smooth tempo shifts in Elliott Carter’s “Fantasy.” The music of the twentieth century is unquestionably distinct from that of earlier eras.
Characteristics of music between 1900-1999
Melody
Few motifs in 20th-century music leave listeners humming, as opposed to many of the songlike melodies of the Romantic era that are readily sung and remembered. To the avant-garde composer, the piece isn’t nearly as crucial as throbbing rhythms, strange textures, or new sounds. Compared to romantic melodies, early 20th-century songs tend to be more fractured (chromatic and angular), fractious, and disjointed. Several composers made considerable efforts to avoid creating lines that were conjunct or stepwise. In contemporary music, octave displacement is substituting a simple interval with a more distant one, generally an octave above or below. The use of chromaticism, on the other hand, is quite prominent. As you can see in these examples by Arnold Schonberg, the melody takes big jumps when it might more easily travel by steps, and there are multiple sharp flats incorporated to form an intensely chromatic line.
Harmony
Triads have been the primary building component of Western music since at least the late Middle Ages. The laws of consonant harmony dictate that a discordant pitch shift or resolve directly to a consonant pitch; however, a composer may insert dissonance (that is, a note outside that triad) for variation and tension. Composers like Wagner started to use more and more chromaticism in their music around the end of the Romantic era. Composers like Schoenberg utilized so much dissonance in the first decade of the 20th century that the triad had all but gone. As a result, Schoenberg referred to this as “the liberation of the dissonance,” which meant that discord had been freed from the need of being resolved into harmony. Schonberg’s dissonance-filled works initially alarmed audiences, but the composer eventually succeeded in “raising the bar” for what the ear may stand and prepared listeners for a far greater degree of dissonance in both classical and popular music. The harsh dissonances of today’s progressive jazz and the dissonant “metal” approaches of Metallica, Slip-knot, and others may be traced back to Schonberg and other like-minded composers (Arnheim, R., 1997 pp, 405).
Composers in the early twentieth century generated dissonance by introducing new chords and obscured or distorted standard triads. The superimposition of additional thirds over a consonant triad was one method for constructing new chords. The seventh chords and the ninth and eleventh chords (covering seven letters of the scale and covering three thirds) were created in this manner. The chord’s tone grew farther away from the listener as additional thirds were added to the fundamental trio. That is, the sounding of many pitches that are barely a complete step or half step apart at the same time was the ultimate new chord. Ragtime musicians like Jelly Roll Morton and Scott Joplin used tone clusters to significant effect in the early years of the twentieth century. Henry Cowell and Charles Ives, two American modernists, were among the composers who used the tone cluster extensively. Using your fist or forearm, strike a group of nearby piano keys to produce a high-dissonance chord.
The conventional function of tonality in music was diminished by chromatic dissonance, new chords, and tone clusters. Keep in mind that the triads were part of a more extensive key system and that their progress toward a tonic was linear. In the absence of triads, keys, and tonality, what were composers supposed to accomplish with their music? Well, they came up with innovative ways to organize music. The 12-tone approach was devised by Arnold Schaumburg, while Igor Stravinsky used extended ostinatos to underpin most of his work (Arnheim, R., 1997 pp, 406).
Rhythm
The duple, triple, and quadruple meter is a typical rhythmic pattern in classical and popular music before the twentieth century. Direct expressiveness, vast subjects, dramatic climaxes, and moments of soft poetry were only a few of the remarkable characteristics of the preceding generation’s romantic music. However, love music was propelled forward in rare instances by an exhilarating, lively beat. Instead, the writing preferred the familiar boundaries of regular accents and duple or triple meter, which it found comforting.
The beginning of the twentieth century saw the face of a revolt among composers of art music against the strict rhythmic and metric regularity that had ruled much of the theme of the nineteenth century. Composers such as Igor Stravinsky and Béla Bartók started to produce music in which syncopations and measures with odd numbers of beats made it almost hard for the listener to perceive standard metric patterns, and this became more popular. Accents and meters shifted from pulse to pulse and measure to measure. Composers like Gertrude Stein and T. S. Eliot, who used free verse instead of typical poetic meters and recurring incidents, influenced these composers by forsaking the traditional patterns of regular rhythms and consistent meters.
Tone Color
Composers of the 20th century ushered forth a new era of sound. In part, this was due to the dissatisfaction of many players with the Romantic symphony orchestra’s string-dominated sound. The luscious vibrato of the string sound was believed to be too emotional for the harsh realities of the contemporary world, and as a result, it was rejected. Woodwinds have taken up the melody-carrying role previously held by the strings. They may now be asked to use the wooden component of their bows to slam down hard on the ropes, or they may use their hands to bang the instrument on its soundbox. Percussive instruments have been elevated in prominence due to this favourite for percussive effects over emotional melody (Levi 1991 pp, 18). Percussion instruments were used to compose whole works. It was not uncommon to hear things with variable pitches such as the cowbell, brake drum, and police siren added to the group’s arsenal of instruments. After a long period of usage in the Romantic era, the piano’s percussive hammer strikes on the strings replaced its lyrical “singing” tone as a coveted symphonic instrument.
Introducing new instruments or using unique playing methods to make conventional tools produce new sounds was a significant breakthrough. On the other hand, composers learned to see musical color as a stand-alone expressive component. Sounds of various hues were often used in classical and romantic eras to differentiate between themes and, as a result, articulate a composition’s shape (Levi 1991 pp, 18). One way to make sure listeners knew a new topic had arrived was to give the second theme in the sonata-allegro form an instrument of its own. At the beginning of the 20th century, Claude Debussy started using color to lend structure to composition instead of relying on it serving as a tool for melody. However, contemporary composers like Charles Ives, Edgar Varèse, and John Cage took Debussy’s bold innovations to extremes (Levi 1991 pp, 18). Their compositions often seem to do nothing but advance from brilliant tones spread widely apart to dark tones clustered exceptionally tightly. As a result, these pieces may not contain a familiar melody or harmony but a stream of sounds with varying hues. A similar approach to color and line was followed by avant-garde artists in the early twentieth century, who dismantled identifiable figures to highlight the expressive power of pure color. Perhaps the most important advance in early modern music and painting occurred when composers and artists realized that color alone might trigger intense emotional responses in the listener or spectator (Levi 1991 pp, 18).
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