20th Century Background

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20th Century Background
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Key Events
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Key Events

• 1894
• Debussy composes the Prelude to the Afternoon of
  a Faun
• 1895
• Rontgen discovers X-rays
• 1897
• Diesel demonstrates the compression-ignition
  engine (cough cough! Gasp! Choke!)

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Key Events

• 1898
• Deutsche Grammophon organized
• 1899
• Elgar composes The Dream of Gerontious
• 1902
• Caruso makes his first recording
• 1903
• The Wright brothers fly, Henry Ford driveslook
  out, everybody!

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Key Events

• 1904
• The London Symphony Orchestra gives its first
  concert
• 1905
• The Duma formed in Russia following the
  revolution
• 1906
• Ives composes The Unanswered Question
• 1907
• First Cubist exhibit in Paris

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Key Events

• 1909
• Ballets Russe formed
• Bleriot flies across the English Channel
• 1911
• Mahler composes Das Lied von der Erde
• Rutherford thinks up the theory of atomic
  structure

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Key Events

• 1912
• Captain of SS Titanic makes BooBoo
• 1914
• World War I begins

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The 20th Century

• Technology
• Travel
• Medical science
• Two world wars
• New words genocide ethnic cleansing
• The atom bomb
• AIDS

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The 20th Century

• Short-sighted economic policies
• Commercial greed
• Destruction of the environment
• Inability to feed millions of starving people

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History of the Arts 1900-1939

• Modernism - a movement of self-conscious
  innovation
• Composers rejected tonality
• The greatest composers in the first half of the
  century were
• Debussy, Stravinsky
• Schoenberg, Berg and Webern
• Bartok, Shostakovich, Britten, Ives, Copland

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History

• WW I (1914-1918)
• 40 million died, 20 million wounded
• After the war, a period of uncertainty
• The Bolshevik revolution gave rise to Communism
• Economic devastation of Germany led to Hitler
• Mussolini founded the first Fascist state in
  Europe
• Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939
• The business of America is business - Calvin
  Cooledge
• The Great Depression of 1929-1933
• A time of turmoil and change

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History of the Arts

• The Jazz Age
• Neo-Classicism
• Machine Music, Electronic Music, National styles
  in England and America

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History-1939-present

• WW II (1939-1945)
• 30 million people died
• Cities and town in England, Europe, and the Far
  East suffered enormous damage
• The economy of Europe was in shambles
• Many refugees came to America making the United
  States the most prominent center of Western
  culture after the war

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History of the Arts

• From 1945-1960s - two trends
• Intellectualization
• Music became organized and mathematical
• Experimentation
• Everything was tried
• Experimentation with sound
• Foremost figures
• Pierre Boulez and John Cage
• Postmodernism

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General Characteristics of 20th Century Music

• The Replacement of Tonality
• 12-tone system
• Atonality
• Pantonality
• Tone clusters
• Pentatonic scale
• Whole-tone scale

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Characteristics

• Tonality
• Modal
• Polytonality
• Non-triadic harmony
• Quartal chords

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Characteristics

• Melody
• Rhythm
• Length
• Tone-color and sound
• Quarter tones
• Telharmonium
• Theremin
• Computer