20th-Century Music: Styles, Composers, and Influences
Impressionism
Composers: Debussy, Delius, Ravel
Impressionism is characterized by a blurring of classical forms, exaggerated attention to musical color, and a focus on modal and chromatic progressions rather than tonal ones. Interestingly, symbolist poets had a greater influence on these composers than impressionistic art did.
Expressionism
Composers: Schoenberg, Webern, Hindemith, Ives
Expressionism features a high level of dissonance, extreme contrasts of dynamics, constant changing of textures, “distorted” melodies and harmonies, and angular melodies with wide leaps. Expressionist painters and artists used color and jarring images. Expressionists were influenced by various artists and sources, including Edvard Munch, Vincent van Gogh, and African art.
Atonality
Schoenberg referred to this as “Pantonal.” Atonality is seen in Expressionism and is defined as music without tonality, or music that is centered around no central key or scale.
Serial Music
Composers: Babbit, Webern, Stockhausen
Serial music is a method of composition in which various musical elements such as pitch, rhythm, dynamics, and tone color may be put in order according to a fixed series.
Twelve-Tone Music
Composers: Schoenberg, Ives
Twelve-tone music is produced by a compositional procedure of the 20th century based upon the free use of all twelve tones of the chromatic scale without a central tone or tonic.
Neo-Classicism
Composers: Berger, Chavez, Gabaye
Neo-Classicism refers to 20th-century composers who used the forms and thematic processes of the Classical era of music.
Neo-Romanticism
Composers: Shostakovich, Britten, Barber, Walton
Neo-Romanticism is a compositional style of the 20th century embodying the techniques and characteristics of the Romantic period (19th century) but incorporated into a 20th-century idiom.
British Renaissance
Composers: Byrd, Des Prez, Dowland, Milano
The Renaissance is a period from the 14th to the 17th century, considered the bridge between the Middle Ages and Modern history. Key features include the philosophy of humanism, the invention of the movable printing press, the decline of Catholicism, and figures like Da Vinci.
Folk Music and its Importance to Choral Music
Folk music is a term used to describe music of the common people that has been passed on by memorization or repetition rather than by writing, and has deep roots in its own culture. Its ever-changing and varying nature is deeply significant to the members of the culture to which it belongs. Folk music created new genres, patterns, rhythms, styles, and arrangements. It also brought about new choral composers who wanted to stay true to the form.
“Chance” Music and its Influence on Contemporary Choral Composers
Aleatory music, also called chance music, is 20th-century music in which chance or indeterminate elements are left for the performer to realize. This includes strictly demarcated areas for improvisation according to specific directions and also unstructured pieces consisting of vague directives. Current composers have more freedom to write outside the norm, as seen in the works of Ives. Chance music allows players and performers to vary the piece themselves, giving more personal meaning and depth to a performance.
Pointillism
Composer: Webern
In Pointillism, different musical notes are made in seclusion, rather than in a linear sequence, giving a sound texture like the painting version of Pointillism. This type of music is also known as punctualism or klangfarbenmelodie.
The Relationship of Music to Art in the Contemporary Period
The Contemporary Era was formed during the last quarter of the nineteenth century through a painting movement called Impressionism. Around 1870, a group of French painters rejected the Romantic Era. This period features:
- Fewer lyrical melodies than other periods
- Dissonant harmonies
- Complex rhythms
- Percussiveness
- Greater use of percussion, brass, and woodwind instruments
- Use of synthetic and electronic sounds
Artists and musicians used the arts to self-express and push boundaries to discover more forms and styles that are now seen today.