XX CENTURY music

• Impressionism

• Expressionism

• Neo-Classicism

• Minimalism

Impressionism

    A stylistic movement that flourished briefly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mainly in French music. The Impressionist movement in music was led by the French composer Claude Debussy. Influenced by the paintings of the French Impressionists and by the poetry of Paul Verlaine, Charles Baudelaire, and Stéphane Mallarmé, musical Impressionism emphasized tonal color and mood rather than formal structures such as the sonata and the symphony. 

    Debussy, an active critic as well as a composer, viewed Impressionism as a reaction to both the formal emphasis of the Classical Style of such composers as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven and the emotional richness of the Romanticism of composers such as Robert Schumann and Franz Schubert. In pursuit of this goal, Debussy developed a combination of new and ancient devices in his music. On the one hand he used the whole-tone scale and complex, hitherto unexploited intervals of the ninth and higher; on the other hand he returned to the parallel fourth and fifth intervals of medieval church music. These technical features were fully developed in Debussy’s early orchestral work Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (1894), based on a poem by Mallarmé. The extensive piano literature composed by Debussy required new performing techniques, including generous but sensitive use of the pedals to create an indistinct wash of sound.

French Impressionist music continued to develop in the work of Maurice Ravel. Other French composers of the impressionist school were Paul Dukas and Albert Roussel. Outside France, various aspects of Debussy’s style were imitated by a number of composers, such as Frederick Delius and Ralph Vaughan Williams in England, Ottorino Respighi in Italy, and Manuel de Falla in Spain.

By the beginning of World War I in 1914, the over refinement and technical limitations of musical Impressionism provoked adverse criticism from composers and critics alike. A new group of anti-Romantic French composers, Les Six, influenced by Erik Satie, satirized and revolted against these excesses. Eventually, Impressionism, which had been conceived by Debussy as a revolt against Romanticism, came to be regarded as the final phase of Romantic music.

Expressionism

   A stylistic tendency in music, which crested around the time of World War I, and gave voice to the anxieties, inner terrors, and cynicism of human life in the 20th century through emotionally intense, musically complex, and carefully structured works. Conventional techniques were distorted, and “pretty” harmonies were avoided in favour of dissonant, complex ones used with great power. The music is often atonal or distorts traditional tonality. Polyphony (interweaving of melodic lines) is often dense, and melody in the traditional sense is often unrecognizable.

    Like Impressionism, Expressionism in music was a term applied by analogy with a movement in the visual arts and, to a certain extent, literature . The roots of Expressionism in music can be seen in the works of late-Romantic composers such as Richard Wagner of Germany and the Austrian composer Gustav Mahler.Examples include two early operas by the German composer Richard Strauss, Salome (1905) and Elektra (1909); certain works of the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg, such as the dramatic scenes Erwartung (Expectation, 1909) and Die Glückliche Hand (The Lucky Hand, 1913), and the song cycle Pierrot Lunaire (1912); and the operas of Alban Berg, Wozzeck (1921) and Lulu (1935; first full performance, 1979). The mood of angst and psychological darkness also showed itself in the instrumental music of the Second Viennese School: Schoenberg’s 5 Orchestral Pieces, Op. 16 (1909), 6 Pieces by Webern, Op. 4 (1910), and Berg’s 3 Pieces, Op. 6 (1914)—all brief, fleeting works, but scored for very large orchestras.

   Other composers with Expressionist elements include Paul Hindemith of Germany, Béla Bartók of Hungary, and Sergei Prokofiev of Russia.

Neo-Classicism

    A term most often referring to a stylistic trend in composition between the two world wars that emphasized the restraint and formal clarity of Classical models.

   At the time it was seen as one of two ways of reacting against the “excesses” of late Romanticism - the twelve-tone system of Schoenberg being the other. Both were austere where Romanticism was lush, restrained where Romanticism was expansive, and emphasized formal clarity where Romanticism had been formally relaxed.        

   Neo-Classical music tended to be harmonically more conservative than the atonal twelve-tone method however, using dissonance as an expressive tool within a basically tonal framework. Baroque music provided the model for Neo-Classical works as much as Classical procedures: for instance, one of the first works of Igor Stravinsky in the new style, the ballet Pulcinella (1920), was based on music by Pergolesi and his contempories, while his Concerto for Piano and Wind instruments (1924) echoed the florid melodic style of the Baroque, as well as the integration of solo and accompaniment found in the concerto grosso, rather than the virtuoso solo display of the Classical concerto. Stravinsky continued in this idiom until the 1950s, longer than most others. After then he began turning to serial techniques.

    Other composers of Neo-Classical works include Prokofiev in the Classical Symphony (1917, although it is untypical of Prokofiev), Satie in his Sonatine Bureaucratique (1917) and Hindemith in his opera Cardillac (1926).

Minimalism

An influential late 20th-century style of composition, also described as systems music, process music, or repetitive music. Rudimentary material, often tonal and scalic and with a strong, regular pulse is repeated over extended timespans, with minimal variation. The style’s simplicity, popularity with audiences, and commercial success have been derided in some quarters, but minimalim has played a vital cultural role in recapturing the general public’s interest in contemporary music.

    Minimalism evolved in the United States. Despite oft-cited precedents in the organa of Pérotin, the Prelude to Wagner’s Das Rheingold, and works by Satie, the important influences were non-Western: Indian improvisation, Balinese gamelan, and African drumming.

   The experimentalists John Cage and Harry Partch can be seen as father-figures, but La Monte Young was the earliest exponent with his group Theater of Eternal Music, founded in 1962. Terry Riley performed in this group, and his In C (1964), consisting entirely of repeating motives in the Ionian mode, was a formative work for minimalism’s leading figures. Music in Similar Motion (1969) by Philip Glass is based on cells, differing by the addition or subtraction of a single unit, each repeated until a signal is given to move on to the next.

   Steve Reich experimented with multiple tape loops whose synchronization moves progressively out of phase in Come Out (1966), and applied the technique to instruments in Piano Phase (1967). His group, Steve Reich and Musicians, and The Philip Glass Ensemble, developed and toured the new repertoire from 1970 onwards, creating works of greater ambition and achievement, such as Reich’s Music for Eighteen Musicians (1976). American minimalism has largely left behind its early radical purity, encompassing opera in Glass’s Einstein on the Beach (1976), and Nixon in China (1987) by John Adams, and the string quartet in Reich’s Different Trains (1988). It has moved closer to the mainstream, with a richer harmonic palette in Reich’s The Desert Music (1984) and Adams’s Harmonielehre (1985), and polyrhythmic writing in Adams’s Chamber Symphony (1992).

    European composers have embraced minimalist styles since the mid-1970s. In the Netherlands, Louis Andriessen combined in De Staat (1976) the American model with a more astringent Stravinsky-inspired harmonic language, influencing Michael Torke, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe in the United States, and Steve Martland in the United Kingdom. Works by the so-called “holy minimalists”, who are drawn to the simplicity of folk music and religious traditions, include the Symphony No. 3 (1976) by Henryk Mikolaj Górecki, Passio (1982) by Arvo Pärt, The Protecting Veil (1988) by John Tavener, and Bemoaned by the Wind (1988) by Giya Kancheli.

    Some British experimentalists, perhaps influenced by Cornelius Cardew, have also turned to repetitive simplicity, for example, Michael Nyman, Gavin Bryars, and Howard Skempton