1910 - present
20th and 21st Century
At the end of the Romantic period, composers pushed the boundaries of musical development so far that they eventually “broke” and a common harmonic language no longer existed.
Harmonies became more dissonant as chromaticism was used to a greater degree. Impressionist composers prioritized color and texture. Others invented their own rules of counterpoint and harmony, such as serialism. Others, the neoclassicists, turned to music from the past for inspiration.
Many composers broke away from traditional major and minor scales and used other scales, such as the whole-tone scale and octatonic scale.
Claude Debussy
1862 - 1918
Chromatism - Impressionism
French composer. Born into near poverty, he showed an early gift for the piano. He entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1873, and soon thereafter he was employed as a pianist by Nadezhda von Meck, Pyotr Tchaikovsky's patroness.
Influenced by the Symbolist poets and Impressionist painters, he was early inclined toward a compositional style of great originality, shunning the strictures of traditional counterpoint and harmony to achieve new effects of great subtlety.
Regarded as the founder of musical Impressionism, he used unusual voice leading and timbral colors to evoke pictorial images and moods, especially of languor and hedonism. His significance in weakening the hold of traditional tonal harmony equals that of Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner, and Arnold Schoenberg.
Given his effect on such composers as Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, and Pierre Boulez, he can be seen as the most influential French composer of the last three centuries. His works include the opera Pelléas et Mélisande (1902), the orchestral works Prelude to The Afternoon of a Faun (1894) and La Mer (1905), and the piano Préludes (1910, 1913).
Scott Joplin
1868–1917
Jazz Influenced Classical Composition
Scott Joplin was an American composer and pianist. He achieved fame for his ragtime compositions and was dubbed the King of Ragtime.
During his brief career, he wrote over 100 original ragtime pieces, one ragtime ballet, and two operas. One of his first and most popular pieces, the "Maple Leaf Rag", became ragtime's first and most influential hit, and has been recognized as the archetypal rag.
Joplin's death is widely considered to mark the end of ragtime as a mainstream music format; over the next several years, it evolved with other styles into stride, jazz, and eventually big band swing.
Arnold Schönberg
1874 - 1951
Expressionism - Serialism - Atonality
Austrian-born U.S. composer. He was raised as a Catholic by his Jewish-born parents.
He began studying violin at age eight and later taught himself cello. While working as a bank clerk, he studied composition with Alexander Zemlinsky (1871 – 1942); Schoenberg soon wrote his first string quartet (1897), which was acclaimed.
With Richard Strauss's help, he obtained a teaching post in Berlin, but he soon returned to Vienna, having composed his gigantic cantata Gurrelieder (1901, orchestrated 1913). In 1904
Alban Berg and Anton Webern began their studies with him, which would profoundly shape their later artistic careers. About 1906 Schoenberg came to believe that tonality had to be abandoned. During his subsequent period of "free atonality" (1907 – 16) he created remarkable works such as the monodrama Erwartung (1909), Five Orchestral Pieces (1909), and Pierrot Lunaire (1912). From 1916 to 1923 he issued almost nothing, being occupied with teaching and conducting but also seeking a way to organize atonality.
He eventually developed the 12-tone method (see serialism), in which each composition is formed from a special row or series of 12 different tones. In 1930 he began work on a three-act opera based on a single tone row; Moses und Aron remained unfinished at his death. The rise of Nazism moved him to reassert his Jewish faith and forced him to flee to the U.S., where he remained, teaching at the University of California at Los Angeles (1936 – 44).
Though never embraced by a broad public, he may have exercised a greater influence on 20th-century music than any other composer.
Palleas and Melisande
Alexander Skrjabin
1872–1915
Chromatism
Russian composer and pianist. He studied piano and composition at the Moscow Conservatory and then launched a successful concert career. His early music was mostly for piano (including études, preludes, and sonatas) but also included two symphonies and a piano concerto.
After 1900 he was much preoccupied with mystical philosophy and began using unusual harmonies, producing a third symphony and the Divine Poem (1904).
He became involved in theosophy, which provided the basis for the orchestral Poem of Ecstasy (1908) and Prometheus (1910); the latter called for the projection of colors onto a screen during the performance.
No longer thinking in terms of music alone, he made sketches for a huge operatic ritual, Mysterium, which was never composed.
Charles Ives
1874 – 1954
Experimentalism
Charles Edward Ives was an American modernist composer, one of the first American composers of international renown.
His music was largely ignored during his early life, and many of his works went unperformed for many years. Later in life, the quality of his music was publicly recognized, and he came to be regarded as an "American original". He was also among the first composers to engage in a systematic program of experimental music, with musical techniques including polytonality, polyrhythm, tone clusters, aleatory elements, and quarter tones.
His experimentation foreshadowed many musical innovations that were later more widely adopted during the 20th century. Hence, he is often regarded as the leading American composer of art music of the 20th century.
Sources of Ives' tonal imagery included hymn tunes and traditional songs; he also incorporated melodies of the town band at holiday parade, the fiddlers at Saturday night dances, patriotic songs, sentimental parlor ballads, and the melodies of Stephen Foster.
Maurice Ravel
1875 - 1937
Jazz influenced Classical Music - Impressionism
French composer. At age 14 he was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire. Completing his piano studies, he returned to study composition with Gabriel Fauré, writing the important piano piece Jeux d'eau (completed 1901) and a string quartet.
In the next decade, he produced some of his best-known music, including Pavane pour une infante défunte (1899), the String Quartet (1903), and the Sonatine for piano (1905).
His great ballet Daphnis et Chloé (1912) was commissioned by the impresario Sergey Diaghilev. Other works include the opera L'Enfant et les sortileges (1925), the suite Le Tombeau de Couperin (1917), and the orchestral works La Valse (1920) and Boléro (1928). Careful and precise, Ravel possessed great gifts as an orchestrator, and his works are universally admired for their superb craftsmanship; he has remained the most widely popular of all French composers.
Béla Viktor János Bartók
1881 - 1945
Modern Classical Music Chromatism
Béla Viktor János Bartók began his musical studies on the piano at age five. His mother was his first teacher; after his father died in 1888, the Bartok family moved to Nagyszolos, where Bela continued his piano studies and took up composition.
At age eleven, he made his first public appearance, playing his own piano music. Bartok enrolled in the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest. he made several tours of Europe after his graduation in 1902.
In 1940 Bartok moved to the United States to get away from the Nazi expansion and was given a teaching position at Columbia University in New York City. Through his collection and analytical study of folk music, he was one of the founders of ethnomusicology.
With the exception of some noted musicians - conductor Serge Koussevitzky and violinist Yehudi Menuhin in particular - he was generally misunderstood and ignored by the musical establishment. He contracted leukemia in the early 1940s, and died in the fall of 1945, unaware of the monumental status he would achieve after death.
Igor Stravinsky
1882 - 1971
Primitivism - Neo-Classicism - Chromatism
Russian-born U.S. composer. Son of an operatic bass, he decided to be a composer at age 20 and studied privately with Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov.
His Fireworks (1908) was heard by the impresario Sergey Diaghilev, who commissioned Stravinsky to write The Firebird ballet (1910); its dazzling success made him Russia's leading young composer.
The great ballet score Petrushka (1911) followed. His next ballet, The Rite of Spring (1913), with its shifting and audacious rhythms and its unresolved dissonances, was a landmark in music history; its Paris premiere caused an actual riot in the theatre, and Stravinsky's international notoriety was assured.
In the early 1920s, he adopted a radically different style of restrained Neoclassicism — employing often ironic references to older music — in works such as his Octet (1923). His major Neoclassical works include Oedipus rex (1927) and the Symphony of Psalms (1930) and culminate in the opera The Rake's Progress (1951). From 1954 he employed serialism, a compositional technique.
His later works include Agon (1957) — the last of his many ballets choreographed by George Balanchine — and Requiem Canticles (1966).
Edgar Varèse
1883 – 1965
Chromatism - Modernism
Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varèse was a French-born composer who spent the greater part of his career in the United States.
Varèse's music emphasizes timbre and rhythm. He coined the term "organized sound" in reference to his own musical aesthetic.
Varèse's conception of music reflected his vision of "sound as living matter" and of "musical space as open rather than bounded". He conceived the elements of his music in terms of "sound-masses", likening their organization to the natural phenomenon of crystallization.[
Varèse thought that "to stubbornly conditioned ears, anything new in music has always been called noise", and he posed the question, "what is music but organized noises?"
Varèse saw potential in using electronic media for sound production, and his use of new instruments and electronic resources led to his being known as the "Father of Electronic Music".
Anton von Webern
1883 - 1945
Serialism - Atonality
Austrian composer. He learned piano and cello as a child and earned a doctorate in musicology at the University of Vienna, specializing in the music of the 15th-century Flemish composer Heinrich Isaac.
In 1904 he and his friend Alban Berg began composition lessons with Arnold Schoenberg, and Webern was soon combining atonality with complex counterpoint in the manner of Isaac, producing works distinctive for their extreme brevity and delicacy.
While Schoenberg was developing the 12-tone method (see serialism) of composition into the 1920s, Webern was independently moving in a similar direction.
After Schoenberg presented the system in 1924, Webern adopted it, composing relatively extended pieces such as the Symphony (1928), Concerto (1934), and Variations for Piano (1936). He earned a living most of his life as a conductor.
During Austria's occupation at the end of World War II, he was accidentally shot and killed by an American soldier. Though he was little appreciated during his lifetime, his works became highly influential internationally in the postwar decades.
Alban Berg
1885 - 1935
Atonality - Serialism - Expressionism
Austrian composer. He was largely self-taught musically until he met Arnold Schoenberg at age 19.
This would prove to be the decisive event in his life, and Schoenberg would remain his teacher for eight years. Under his influence, Berg's early late-Romantic tonal works gave way to increasing atonality and finally (1925) to 12-tone composition.
His Expressionist opera Wozzeck (1922) would become the most universally acclaimed post-Romantic opera.
His second opera, Lulu, on which he worked for six years, remained unfinished at his death. Berg's other works include two string quartets, including the Lyric Suite (1926); Three Pieces for Orchestra (1915); and a violin concerto (1935).
Sergei Prokofiev
1891- 1953
Moder Classical Music - Neo Classicism
Sergei Prokofiev was one of the most prolific and celebrated Russian composers of the 20th century. Sergei Prokofiev is perhaps most famous for music he composed for the children's story Peter and the Wolf.
He proved his talent as a pianist and composer at a very early age, and in 1904 moved with his mother to St. Petersburg, where he studied at the St. Petersburg Conservatory.
As a young man, he traveled to England and Europe on tour, and in 1918 he left Russia for the United States. During the 1920s he toured New York, Chicago, London, and Paris, gaining popularity with audiences, if not with critics. In 1927 he returned to perform in the Soviet Union and was greeted as a national hero. In the early 1930s, he traveled between Paris and Moscow, finally settling in Moscow in 1936.
A few years later, World War II marked the beginning of Prokofiev's rocky relationship with the Soviet government of Joseph Stalin. Although he continued to be a productive composer, in the late 1940s Prokofiev fell out of favor with government officials and spent his last years in failing health and financial insecurity.
His works include the ballets Chout and The Love for Three Oranges, operas such as The Fiery Angel and War and Peace (based on the novel by Leo Tolstoy), and music for the Sergei Eisenstein films Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Ivan the Terrible (1942-46). Modern audiences know Prokofiev's work primarily through the many symphonic suites he composed based on his stage and film work.
Carl Orff
1895- 1982
Modern Classical Music - Neo Classicism
German composer and music educator. He trained at the Munich Academy and held several musical posts thereafter.
In the 1920s he grew interested in early Baroque music and the association of music with movement. In 1924 he cofounded a school for which he devised a comprehensive music education program (Orff Schulwerk) involving improvisation on specially designed gamelan-like percussion instruments; the program has since come into wide international use.
He typically used repetitive rhythms, bare harmonies, and powerfully direct vocal parts, as in his best-known work, the secular oratorio Carmina Burana (1937), which is based on a manuscript of medieval poems.
Paul Hindemith
1895 - 1963
Chromatism - Neo Classicism
German composer. His talent was noticed early, and he received thorough training on the viola, violin, clarinet, and piano.
He became concertmaster of the Frankfurt Opera at age 20, and his compositions began drawing attention at new-music festivals.
Because his wife was Jewish and his music was considered "degenerate" by the Nazis, he left Germany in 1938, settling in the U.S. in 1940. Advocating Gebrauchsmusik ("useful music"), he wrote solo sonatas and concertos for many of the standard orchestral instruments. Mathis der Maler (1935) is the best known of his six operas; the symphony based on it, and the Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes of Weber (1943), is widely performed.
George Gershwin
1898 - 1937
Jazz-influenced Classical Music
U.S. composer. Born to Russian-Jewish immigrants, he heard jazz performed live from about age six. In his teens, he worked as a song plugger (playing piano in Tin Pan Alley to demonstrate sheet music for potential customers), and in 1916 he published his first song. In 1919 his "Swanee" was performed by Al Jolson and achieved extraordinary success.
Gershwin's first complete score was for the show La, La Lucille (1919). The bandleader Paul Whiteman commissioned from him the hugely successful orchestral work Rhapsody in Blue (1924). It was revolutionary for its incorporation of the jazz idiom (blue notes, syncopated rhythms, onomatopoeic instrumental effects) into a symphonic context. Gershwin's first major Broadway success, Lady, Be Good! (1924), was a collaboration with his brother, lyricist Ira Gershwin.
They soon established themselves as one of the great teams in Broadway history; their shows included Oh, Kay! (1926), Strike Up the Band (1927), Funny Face (1927), Girl Crazy (1930), and the satire Of Thee I Sing (1931), the first musical to win a Pulitzer Prize. He also scored several successful films. His most ambitious work was the "folk opera" Porgy and Bess (1935), a collaboration with Ira and novelist DuBose Heyward. Gershwin's classical compositions include a piano concerto (1925) and the tone poem An American in Paris (1928).
His early death was the result of a brain tumour.
Aaron Copland
1900 - 1990
Jazz influenced Classical Music
Aaron Copland was an American composer, composition teacher, writer, and later a conductor of his own and other American music. Copland was referred to by his peers and critics as "the Dean of American Composers".
The open, slowly changing harmonies in much of his music are typical of what many people consider to be the sound of American music, evoking the vast American landscape and pioneer spirit.
He is best known for the works he wrote in the 1930s and 1940s in a deliberately accessible style often referred to as "populist" and which the composer labeled his "vernacular" style.[
Works in this vein include the ballets Appalachian Spring, Billy the Kid and Rodeo, his Fanfare for the Common Man, and Third Symphony. In addition to his ballets and orchestral works, he produced music in many other genres, including chamber music, vocal works, opera, and film scores.
Kurt Weill
1900 - 1950
Jazz influenced Classical Music
German-born U.S. composer. Son of a cantor, by age 15 he was working as a theatre accompanist.
He studied composition briefly with Engelbert Humperdinck, and a conductor's post gave him wide experience.
For a master class with Ferruccio Busoni (1920), he wrote his first symphony. He gained attention with his one-act opera Der Protagonist (1925); its sparse and spiky style prefigured that of his greatest works. In 1927 he teamed with Bertolt Brecht to write The Threepenny Opera (1928) in a new "cabaret" style; the musical had enormous success in Berlin and elsewhere. In 1930 the two produced The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.
When the Nazis took power in 1933, he fled to Paris with his wife, Lotte Lenya, where he wrote The Seven Deadly Sins (1933). In 1935 the couple immigrated to the U.S.; there he collaborated on musicals such as Knickerbocker Holiday (1938) and Lost in the Stars (1949). Two of his songs, the "Morität" ("Mack the Knife") from Threepenny Opera and "September Song" from Knickerbocker Holiday, have remained especially popular.
Dmitri Schostakowitsch
1906–1975
Modern Classical Music
Russian composer and pianist. Had piano. lessons from his mother at age 9 and later at Glasser School of Music 1916–18. Entered Petrograd Cons. 1919, encouraged and helped by Glazunov, and studied pf. with Nikolayev and comp. with M. Steinberg. Completed pf. course in 4 years and made several concert appearances. Gained 'honorable mention' in Int. Chopin Comp., Warsaw, 1927.
His diploma work, the 1st Sym., was perf. in Leningrad and Moscow in 1926 and earned the composer world fame at the age of 20. As a convinced believer in Russian socialism, he sought ways in which his music could serve the state headed 'Chaos instead of Music' .
In 1943 he settled in Moscow, becoming professor of composition at the Conservatorium. He was relieved of his Moscow professorship and did not resume the post until 1960. He visited England in 1958 and 1974, becoming a close friend and admirer of Britten. He had heart attacks in 1969 and 1971 and was in fragile health thereafter. Many consider that Shostakovich is the greatest 20th cent. composer.
It is apparent now that Shostakovich soon became disillusioned with the Soviet system and that the intensifying darkness and bitterness of his work reflect a spiritual misery connected with external events The tensions within him produced a succession of masterpieces.