QUARTER I: MUSIC OF THE 20TH CENTURY
IMPRESSIONISM
It is a French movement in the late 19 th and early
th
20 century. There is an extensive use of colors and effects,
vague melodies, and innovative chords and progressions
leading to mild dissonances. Impressionism was an attempt
not to depict reality, but merely to suggest it. It was meant to
create an emotional mood rather than a specific picture. In
terms of imagery, impressionistic forms were translucent and
hazy, as if trying to see through a rain-drenched window.
CLAUDE DEBUSSY
He was the primary exponent of the impressionist
movement and the focal point for other impressionist
composers. He changed the course of musical development
by dissolving traditional rules and conventions into a new
language of possibilities in harmony, rhythm, form, texture,
and color. He gained a reputation as an erratic pianist and a
rebel in theory and harmony. Debussy’s mature creative
period was represented by the following works:
 Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun
 Pelleas et Melisande
 La Mer - about the sea
 Claire de Lune (Moonlight)
MAURICE RAVEL
The compositional style of Ravel is mainly
characterized by its uniquely innovative but not atonal style
of harmonic treatment. It is defined with intricate and
sometimes modal melodies and extended chordal
components. It demands considerable technical virtuosity
from the performer which is the character, ability, or skill of a
virtuoso—a person who excels in musical technique or
execution. Ravel’s works include the following:
 Pavane for a Dead Princess
 Jeux d’Eau or Water Fountains
 Miroirs (Mirrors)
 Gaspard de la Nuit, the most difficult piece in the piano
 Bolero
EXPRESSIONISM
It revealed the composer’s mind, instead of
presenting an impression of the environment. It used
atonality and the twelve-tone scale, lacking stable and
conventional harmonies. It served as a medium for
expressing strong emotions, such as anxiety, rage, and
alienation.
ARNOLD SCHOENBERG
Schoenberg’s style was constantly undergoing
development. Although full of melodic and lyrical interest, his
music is also extremely complex, creating heavy demands
on the listener. His works were met with extreme reactions,
either strong hostility from the general public or enthusiastic
acclaim from his supporters. His works include the following:
 Three Pieces for Piano, op. 11
 Pierrot Lunaire,
 Gurreleider
 Verklarte Nacht (Transfigured Night)
IGOR STRAVINSKY
He is one of the great trendsetters of the 20th
century. His first successful masterpiece is the The Firebird
Suite (1910). The Rite of Spring (1913) was another
outstanding work. Stravinsky adapted the forms of the 18th
century with his contemporary style of writing. Other
outstanding works include the ballet Petrouchka (1911),
featuring shifting rhythms and polytonality, a signature
device of the composer. The Rake’s Progress (1951), a full-
length opera, alludes heavily to the Baroque and Classical
styles of Bach and Mozart through the use of the
harpsichord, small orchestra, solo and ensemble numbers
with recitatives stringing to gather the different songs.
NEO-CLASSICISM
Neo-classicism was a moderating factor between
the emotional excesses of the Romantic period and the
violent impulses of the soul in expressionism. It was, in
essence, a partial return to an earlier style of writing,
particularly the tightly-knit form of the Classical period, while
combining tonal harmonies with slight dissonances.
BELA BARTOK
As a neo-classicist, primitivist, and nationalist
composer, Bartok used Hungarian folk themes and rhythms.
His compositions were successful because of their rich
melodies and lively rhythms. Bartok is most famous for his
Six String Quartets. It represents the greatest achievement
of his creative life, spanning a full 30 years for their
completion. The Concerto for Orchestra, a five-movement
work composed late in Bartok’s life, features the exceptional
talents of its various soloists in an intricately constructed
piece. The short and popular Allegro Barbaro for solo piano
is punctuated with swirling rhythms and percussive chords.
SERGEI PROKOFIEFF
His style is uniquely recognizable for its progressive
technique, pulsating rhythms, melodic directness, and a
resolving dissonance. His contacts with Diaghilev and
Stravinsky gave him the chance to write music for the ballet
and opera, notably the ballet Romeo and Juliet and the
opera War and Peace. He wrote Peter and the Wolf, a light-
hearted orchestral work intended for children, to appease
the continuing government crackdown on avant garde
composers at the time.
FRANCIS POULENC
His compositions had a coolly elegant modernity,
tempered by a classical sense of proportion. Poulenc was a
successful composer for piano, voice, and choral music. His
output included the harpsichord concerto, known as Concert
Champetre (1928); the Concerto for Two Pianos (1932),
which combined the classical touches of Mozart with a
refreshing mixture of wit and exoticism in the style of Ravel.
Poulenc’s choral works tended to be more somber and
solemn, as portrayed by Litanies a la vierge noire (Litanies
of the Black Madonna, 1936), with its monophony, simple
harmony, and startling dissonance; and Stabat Mater (1950),
which carried a Baroque solemnity with a prevailing style of
unison singing and repetition.
AVANTE GARDE MUSIC
Closely associated with electronic music, the avant
garde movement dealt with the parameters or the
dimensions of sound in space. The avant garde style
exhibited a new attitude toward musical mobility, whereby
the order of note groups could be varied so that musical
continuity could be altered. Improvisation was a necessity in
this style, for the musical scores were not necessarily
followed as written.
GEORGE GERSHWIN
Considered the “Father of American Jazz,” his
“mixture of the primitive and the sophisticated” gave his
music an appeal that has lasted long after his death. He also
composed Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and An American in
Paris (1928), which incorporated jazz rhythms with classical
forms. His opera Porgy and Bess (1934) remains to this day
the only American opera to be included in the established
repertory of this genre. He is a true “crossover artist,” in the
sense that his serious compositions remain highly popular in
the classical repertoire, as his stage and film songs continue
to be jazz and vocal standards.
LEONARD BERNSTEIN
 He endeared himself to his many followers as a
charismatic conductor, pianist, composer, and lecturer.
Bernstein is best known for his compositions for the stage.
Foremost among these is the musical West Side Story
(1957), an American version of Romeo and Juliet, which
displays a tuneful, off-beat, and highly atonal approach to
the songs. Other outputs include another Broadway hit
Candide (1956) and the much-celebrated Mass.
PHILIP GLASS
He was one of the most commercially successful
minimalist composers and also an avant garde composer.
He explored the territories of ballet, opera, theater, film, and
even television jingles. Aided by soothing vocal effects and
horn sounds, his music is often criticized as uneventful and
shallow, yet startlingly effective for its hypnotic charm. Glass
collaborated with theater conceptualist Robert Wilson to
produce the four-hour opera Einstein on the Beach (1976). It
puts minimalism in the mainstream of 20th century music.
Modern Nationalism
A looser form of 20th century music development
focused on nationalist composers and musical innovators
who sought to combine modern techniques with folk
materials. In Eastern Europe, prominent figures included the
Hungarian Bela Bartok and the Russian Sergei Prokofieff,
who were neo-classicists to a certain extent. Prokofieff used
striking dissonances and Russian themes, and his music
was generally witty, bold, and at times colored with humor.
Together with Bartok, Prokofieff made extensive use of
polytonality, a kind of atonality that uses two or more tonal
centers simultaneously. An example of this style is
Prokofieff’s Visions Fugitive.
20TH CENTURY MUSICAL STYLES
The musical styles that evolved in the modern era
were varied. New inventions and discoveries of science and
technology lead to continuing developments in the field of
music. Technology has produced electronic music devices
such as cassette tape recorders, compact discs and their
variants, the video compact disc (VCD) and the digital video
disc (DVD), MP3, MP4, ipod, iphone, karaoke players,
mobile phones and synthesizers. These devices are used for
creating and recording music to add to or to replace
acoustical sounds.
ELECTRONIC MUSIC
The capacity of electronic machines such as
synthesizers, amplifiers, tape recorders, and loudspeakers
to create different sounds was given importance by 20th
century composers like Edgar Varese, Karlheinz
Stockhausen, and Mario Davidovsky.
Music that uses the tape recorder is called musique
concrete, or concrete music. The composer records different
sounds that are heard in the environment such as the bustle
of traffic, the sound of the wind, the barking of dogs, the
strumming of a guitar, or the cry of an infant. These sounds
are arranged by the composer in different ways like by
playing the tape recorder in its fastest mode or in reverse. In
musique concrete, the composer is able to experiment with
different sounds that cannot be produced by regular musical
instruments such as the piano or the violin.
EDGARD VARESE
His use of new instruments and electronic resources
made him the “Father of Electronic Music” and he was
described as the “Stratospheric Colossus of Sound.” He was
considered an “innovative French-born composer.” However,
he spent the greater part of his life and career in the United
States, where he pioneered and created new sounds that
bordered between music and noise. He invented the term
“organized sound,” which means that certain timbres and
rhythms can be grouped together in order to capture a whole
new definition of sound. Although his complete surviving
works are scarce, he has been recognized to have
influenced several major composers of the late 20th century.
KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN
He is a central figure in the realm of electronic
music. Stockhausen’s music was initially met with resistance
due to its heavily atonal content with practically no clear
melodic or rhythmic sense. Still, he continued to experiment
with musique concrete. Some of his works include Gruppen
(1957), a piece for three orchestras that moved music
through time and space; Kontakte (1960), a work that
pushed the tape machine to its limits; and the epic Hymnen
(1965), an ambitious two-hour work of 40 juxtaposed songs
and anthems from around the world. The climax of his
compositional ambition came in 1977 when he announced
the creation of Licht (Light), a seven-part opera (one for
each day of the week) for a gigantic ensemble of solo
voices, solo instruments, solo dancers, choirs, orchestras,
mimes, and electronics. His recent Helicopter String
Quartet, in which a string quartet performs whilst airborne in
four different helicopters, develops his long-standing
fascination with music which moves in space.
CHANCE MUSIC
It refers to a style wherein the piece always sounds
different at every performance because of the random
techniques of production, including the use of ring
modulators or natural elements that become a part of the
music. Most of the sounds emanate from the surroundings,
both natural and man-made, such as honking cars, rustling
leaves, blowing wind, dripping water, or a ringing phone. As
such, the combination of external sounds cannot be
duplicated as each happens by chance.
JOHN CAGE
He was known as one of the 20th century
composers with the widest array of sounds in his works. He
became one of the most original composers in the history of
western music. He challenged the very idea of music by
manipulating musical instruments in order to achieve new
sounds. In one instance, Cage created a “prepared” piano,
where screws and pieces of wood or paper were inserted
between the piano strings to produce different percussive
possibilities. He became famous for his composition Four
Minutes and 33 Seconds (4’33"), a chance musical work that
instructed the pianist to merely open the piano lid and
remain silent for the length of time indicated by the title. The
work was intended to convey the impossibility of achieving
total silence, since surrounding sounds can still be heard
amidst the silence of the piano performance. Cage also
advocated bringing real-life experiences into the concert hall.
This reached its extreme when he composed a work that
required him to fry mushrooms on stage in order to derive
the sounds from the cooking process. As a result of his often
irrational ideas like this, he developed a following in the
1960s. More than any other modern composer, Cage
influenced the development of modern music since the
1950s. He was considered more of a musical philosopher
than a composer. His conception of what music can and
should be has had a profound impact upon his
contemporaries.
Source: HORIZONS, Grade 10 Learner’s Materials: Music and Arts
Appreciation for Young Filipinos; Raul M. Sunico, Ph.D., Evelyn F.
Cabanban, Melissa Y. Moran
PREPARED BY: SMNHS MAPEH Dept. Grade 10 Teachers