20th-century classical music

Art music composed between 1901 and 2000, encompassing styles from late Romanticism and modernism to minimalism, electronic music, and experimental approaches.

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Modernism: A broad cultural movement that challenged inherited forms and conventions through experimentation and innovation. Its musical strand rejected or transformed established tonal and formal expectations.
The Rite of Spring: Igor Stravinsky’s 1913 ballet score, known for rhythmic force and dissonant orchestral writing. Its Paris premiere became a defining flashpoint for musical modernism.
Igor Stravinsky: A Russian-born composer whose works moved through modernist, neoclassical, and later serial styles. His changing idioms make the century’s stylistic shifts visible in one career.
Romantic music: A nineteenth-century art-music tradition emphasizing expressive intensity, expanded forms, and rich harmonic language. Many twentieth-century works respond to, extend, or reject its inherited conventions.
Extended technique: An unconventional way of playing an instrument that expands its usual sounds or techniques. Composers used these methods to enlarge instrumental timbre beyond standard technique.
Atonality: Music that lacks a governing tonal center. It became a defining option for composers seeking alternatives to traditional tonality.
Pierrot Lunaire: Arnold Schoenberg’s 1912 melodrama for voice and chamber ensemble, using Sprechstimme and atonal writing. It shows how expressionist modernism reshaped vocal and instrumental sound.
Arnold Schoenberg: An Austrian composer who developed atonality and the twelve-tone method. His break with tonality profoundly shaped modernist composition and its critics.
Common-practice period: The era in Western music when tonal harmony and related formal conventions broadly governed composition. Modernist departures become clearer against the tonal system that preceded them.
Musique concrète: A compositional practice that builds music from recorded sounds transformed through playback and editing. It established recorded environmental sound as material for composition.