Musical Era
20th Century / Modernist
Composers break from tonality and reinvent what music could be.
The 20th century opens with composers actively dismantling the assumptions the previous three hundred years had been built on. For centuries, music had been organized around tonality - the pull of a home key that a piece leaves and returns to. Around 1900, composers began to stretch, blur, and finally abandon that pull, and the result was an explosion of new styles, often existing side by side.
The world it came from
This was a period of upheaval: two world wars, the Russian Revolution, and the rise of totalitarian regimes. Paris and Vienna were the great centers of new music, with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes commissioning daring scores in Paris. Technology changed listening too: recordings and radio brought music into homes on a scale never seen before. Politics reached directly into music. The Soviet state dictated what Shostakovich and Prokofiev could write, and the Nazis banned music by Jewish and modernist composers as "degenerate," driving many - including Schoenberg and Béla Bartók - into exile in the United States.
The main currents
Impressionism. Claude Debussy leads one branch of this - Impressionism - using blurred, ambiguous harmony to evoke atmosphere and color rather than tell a clear harmonic "story" the way Classical or Romantic music did. Ravel brought the same colors into sharper focus. See Impressionism.
Atonality and the twelve-tone method. A more radical branch abandons tonality altogether. Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire (1912) is a landmark of this Expressionist, atonal style, and in the early 1920s his twelve-tone technique treated all twelve notes of the chromatic scale as equals, with no single note allowed to dominate as a "home." His pupils Alban Berg and Anton Webern - together, the "Second Viennese School" - took it in very different directions. See serialism.
Rhythm and primitivism. Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring took a different route to the same shock - not atonality, but brutal, irregular rhythm and dissonance so aggressive it reportedly caused a riot at its 1913 premiere.
Neoclassicism. After the First World War, many composers reacted against Romantic excess by looking back to the clarity of the 18th century - Stravinsky's Pulcinella and Prokofiev's "Classical" Symphony are classic examples.
Folk music and nationalism. Bartók traveled through rural Hungary and Romania recording peasant songs, which transformed his music; Ralph Vaughan Williams did the same with English folk song.
Jazz and America. Jazz fascinated European composers like Ravel, and in the United States George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and Copland's open-prairie sound gave American concert music its own voice. Charles Ives, who worked as an insurance executive, had already been experimenting with layered, clashing keys for years.
Composers to know
Igor Stravinsky (rhythm and primal energy), Claude Debussy (Impressionist color), and Arnold Schoenberg (atonality and the twelve-tone method) are the essential trio, and the composer pages listed below cover many more. Beyond them:
- Béla Bartók (1881 – 1945) - Hungarian folk music fused with modernism.
- Alban Berg (1885 – 1935) - the most Romantic of Schoenberg's pupils; his opera Wozzeck is a modern classic.
- Jean Sibelius (1865 – 1957) - Finland's great symphonist.
- Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872 – 1958) - England's pastoral voice.
- George Gershwin (1898 – 1937) - classical music meets jazz.
- Francis Poulenc (1899 – 1963) - witty, tuneful, and devout by turns.
Into the Contemporary era
The Second World War marks the break. After 1945, a new generation of composers rejected the past even more radically - or turned in completely new directions - and the Contemporary era began.
Where to start listening: Debussy's Clair de Lune is a gentle way in; Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring is the era's most confrontational and most rewarding piece once you're ready for it. In between, Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue and Copland's Appalachian Spring are both instantly appealing.