Late Nineteenth-Century Developments after Beethoven
Beethoven Symphonies 1, 2, 4, 7, 8
↓
Brahms, Bruckner, Verdi, Mahler
Example: Johannes Brahms (1833-1897), Symphony No. 3 in F major (1883), Op. 90 3rd movement
Beethoven Symphonies 3, 5, 6, 9
↓
Liszt, Wagner, Debussy, Schoenberg
Example: Franz Liszt, Nuages gris (1881)
Aspects of Twentieth-Century Style
Style Periods

Schools, “-isms”, groups

Personal Musical Languages

Personal Musical Languages affected by such influences as:
1.
Electronic media and mass communication
2.
Rise of popular culture
3.
Globalization (musics and other art, philosophies, religions, cultures in general)
4.
Apparent exhaustion of traditional composition
5.
Apparent exhaustion of traditional instruments and performance techniques
-ISMS
Nationalism
Applied to a movement in music, about the middle of the 19th century, in which composers became
eager for their music to embody elements that proclaimed its nationality. Incorporation of folk
melodies, folk dances, folk instruments, and other aspects of a nation’s indigenous or traditional music.
Bedrich Smetana (1824-84), Czech
Modest Mussorgsky (1844-1908), Russia
Edvard Grieg (1843-1907), Norway
Jean Sibelius (1865-1957), Finland
Enrique Granados (1867-1916), Spain
Ralph Vaugh William (1872-1958), England
Béla Bartók (1881-1945), Hungary
Charles Ives (1874-1954), USA
Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971), Russia
Bedřich Smetana (1824-84)
Nationalism: a movement in music, about the middle of the 19th century, in which composers became
eager for their music to embody elements that proclaimed its nationality. Incorporation of folk
melodies, folk dances, folk instruments, and other aspects of a nation’s indigenous or traditional music.
Example: B. Smetana, “The Moldau” from Má vlast [My Country] (1874-79)
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-93)
Example: Symphony No. 4 (1893), second movement
Modest Mussorgsky (1839-81)
Example: Pictures at an Exhibition (1874)
Impressionism
First used in the 1870s in regard to the paintings of Monet, Renoir, Pissaro and others. In music
seen/heard as blurring of outlines of traditional tonal harmonic progressions, use of modal and
pentatonic harmonic language, static or ambiguous rhythm, metre and harmony; finely graded
instrumental colours; non-climactic melodies often circling around a single pitch; continuously evolving
forms without clear structural divisions; complex textures.
Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
Example: Prélude à l'après-midi d’un faune (1894)
Primitivism
Example: Le sacre du printemps (1913)
Example: Béla Bartók (1881-1945), Concerto for Orchestra (1943), fourth movement
In addition to being a concert pianist and composer, Bartók’s studies of non-Western musics made him
one of the founders of the discipline of ethnomusicology.
Expressionism
Term, applied originally to painting and literature, used for the intensely emotional manner used in the
arts from the second decade of the 20th century. Seen in the works of Kandinsky, Kokoschka, Munch.
Edvard Munch (1863-1944), Der Schrei (The Scream) (1895)
The term is applied to music ca. 1918. Represents the avoidance of traditional forms of the beautiful in
order to express feelings in the most powerful, personal, sometimes violent and extremely intense way.
Most often related to atonal and 12-tone composition
Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951)
Atonality: Music that lacks any kind of tonal centre. Uses all notes in a chromatic scale equally in order
to avoid emphasis on a single pitch. Schoenberg preferred the term pantonality.
Sprechstimme, Sprechgesang: meaning “Speaking Voice” or “Speaking Song”, an expressionistic vocal
technique between speech and song in which pitches are only approximately notated.
Example: Arnold Schoenberg, “Madonna”from Pierrot Lunaire (1912)
Second Viennese School
Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951)
Alban Berg (1885-1935)
Anton Webern (1883-1945)
Serialism
A method of composition in which one or more musical elements is subject to ordering in a fixed series.
Most commonly the elements so arranged are the 12 chromatic pitches within the octave — 12-tone
music. First used by Schoenberg in the early 1920s, and later applied to other elements of composition.
Example: Anton Webern, Five movements for String Quartet, Op. 5 (1928-29), Third Movement
Neo-Classicism
Return to forms, genres and ideals of the 18th century and earlier — symphonies, sonatas, etc. —
though with modifications to stories (in opera), harmony, rhythm, etc. Transparency, clarity, a degree of
accessibility.
Example: Sergey Prokofiev (1891-1953), Classical Symphony (Symphony No. 1; 1917), First Movement