20th-century classical music
Modernism, impressionism, and post-romanticism can all be traced to the decades before the turn of the 20th century, but can be included because they evolved beyond the musical boundaries of the 19th-century styles that were part of the earlier common practice period.
[5] After the First World War, composers started returning to the past for inspiration and wrote works that drew elements (form, harmony, melody, structure) from it.
The "Machine Music" of George Antheil (starting with his Second Sonata, "The Airplane") and Alexander Mosolov (most notoriously his Iron Foundry) developed out of this.
The process of extending musical vocabulary by exploring all available tones was pushed further by the use of Microtones in works by Charles Ives, Julián Carrillo, Alois Hába, John Foulds, Ivan Wyschnegradsky, Harry Partch and Mildred Couper among many others.
[9] The term is also used to describe music within specific genres that pushes against their boundaries or definitions, or else whose approach is a hybrid of disparate styles, or incorporates unorthodox, new, distinctly unique ingredients.
Other Russians, notably Dmitri Shostakovich, reflected the social impact of communism and subsequently had to work within the strictures of socialist realism in their music.
The culture of the United States of America, especially, began informing an American vernacular style of classical music, notably in the works of Charles Ives, John Alden Carpenter, and (later) George Gershwin.
Folk music (Vaughan Williams' Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus, Gustav Holst's A Somerset Rhapsody) and jazz (Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, Darius Milhaud's La création du monde) were also influential.
At the end of the 19th century (often called the Fin de siècle), the Romantic style was starting to break apart, moving along various parallel courses, such as Impressionism and Post-romanticism.
[13] Neoclassicism was a style cultivated between the two world wars, which sought to revive the balanced forms and clearly perceptible thematic processes of the 17th and 18th centuries, in a repudiation of what were seen as exaggerated gestures and formlessness of late Romanticism.
[15] Impressionism started in France as a reaction, led by Claude Debussy, against the emotional exuberance and epic themes of German Romanticism exemplified by Wagner.
[17] Many French composers continued impressionism's language through the 1920s and later, including Albert Roussel, Charles Koechlin, André Caplet, and, later, Olivier Messiaen.
Composers from non-Western cultures, such as Tōru Takemitsu, and jazz musicians such as Duke Ellington, Gil Evans, Art Tatum, and Cecil Taylor also have been strongly influenced by the impressionist musical language.
Sergei Prokofiev, Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, Arthur Honegger, George Antheil, Leo Ornstein, and Edgard Varèse are among the notable composers in the first half of the century who were influenced by futurism.
Characteristic features of later 20th-century music with origins in futurism include the prepared piano, integral serialism, extended vocal techniques, graphic notation, improvisation, and minimalism.
[20] In the early part of the 20th century, Charles Ives integrated American and European traditions as well as vernacular and church styles, while using innovative techniques in his rhythm, harmony, and form.
By the late 1920s, though many composers continued to write in a vaguely expressionist manner, it was being supplanted by the more impersonal style of the German Neue Sachlichkeit and neoclassicism.
Because expressionism, like any movement that had been stigmatized by the Nazis, gained a sympathetic reconsideration following World War II, expressionist music resurfaced in works by composers such as Hans Werner Henze, Pierre Boulez, Peter Maxwell Davies, Wolfgang Rihm, and Bernd Alois Zimmermann.
Currently, postmodernism includes composers who react against the avant-garde and experimental styles of the late 20th century such as Astor Piazzolla, Argentina, and Miguel del Águila, USA.
According to Reich, “Drumming is the final expansion and refinement of the phasing process, as well as the first use of four new techniques: (1) the process of gradually substituting beats for rests (or rests for beats); (2) the gradual changing of timbre while rhythm and pitch remain constant; (3) the simultaneous combination of instruments of different timbre; and (4) the use of the human voice to become part of the musical ensemble by imitating the exact sound of the instruments”.
La Monte Young's Compositions 1960 employs very long tones, exceptionally high volumes and extra-musical techniques such as "draw a straight line and follow it" or "build a fire".
While his early works were in a late Romantic style influenced by Wagner (Verklärte Nacht, 1899), this evolved into an atonal idiom in the years before the First World War (Drei Klavierstücke in 1909 and Pierrot lunaire in 1912).
Berg, like Schoenberg, employed twelve-tone technique within a late-romantic or post-romantic style (Violin Concerto, which quotes a Bach Choral and uses Classical form).
Sometimes such electronic music was combined with more conventional instruments, Edgard Varèse's Déserts (1954), Stockhausen's Hymnen (1969), Claude Vivier's Wo bist du Licht!
