| The Twentieth Century
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By the turn of the century and for the next few decades, artists of
all nationalities were searching for exciting and different modes of
expression. Composers such as Arnold Schoenberg explored unusual and unorthodox harmonies and tonal
schemes. French composer Claude Debussy was fascinated by Eastern music and the whole-tone scale,
and created a style of music named after the movement in French painting
called Impressionism. Hungarian composer Bela Bartok continued in the traditions of the still strong Nationalist
movement and fused the music of Hungarian peasants with twentieth
century forms. Avant-garde composers such as Edgard Varese explored the manipulation of rhythms rather than the usual
melodic/harmonic schemes. The tried-and-true genre of the symphony,
albeit somewhat modified by this time, attracted such masters as Gustau
Mahler and Dmitri Shostakovich, while Igor Stravinsky gave full rein to his manipulation of kaleidoscopic
rhythms and instrumental colors throughout his extremely long and varied
career.
While many composers throughout the twentieth-century experimented in
new ways with traditional instruments (such as the "prepared
piano" used by American composer John Cage), many of the twentieth-century's greatest composers, such as
Italian opera composer Giacom Puccini and the Russian pianist/composer
Sergei Rachmaninoff, remained true to the traditional forms of music
history. In addition to new and eclectic styles of musical trends, the
twentieth century boasts numerous composers whose harmonic and melodic
styles an average listener can still easily appreciate and enjoy.
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 Arnold
Schoenberg has exercised very considerable influence over the course of
music in the 20th century, particularly through his development and
promulgation of theories of composition in which unity in a work is
provided by the use of a determined series, usually consisting of the
twelve possible different semitones, their order also inverted or taken in
retrograde form, and in transposed versions. Schoenberg's earlier
compositions are post-romantic in character, followed by a period in which
he developed his theories of atonality, music without a key or tonal center.
Born in Vienna in 1874, he spent his early career in Berlin, until the
rise to power of Hitler made it necessary to leave Germany and find safety
in America, where he died in 1951. With his pupils Anton Webern and Alban
Berg, both of whom he outlived, he represents a group of composers known
as the Second Viennese School. Schoenberg's most important opera is Moses
und Aron, of which he completed only two of the three acts. Gurrelieder,
written between 1901 and 1903, is a work of Wagnerian proportions and
mood, for solo voices, large chorus and orchestra. Other, later vocal
music includes A Survivor from Warsaw, written in 1947, for narrator, male
voices and orchestra. Solo songs range from the 1909 settings of Stefan
George in Das Buch der hängenden Gärten (The Book of the Hanging Garden)
to the cabaret songs he wrote for the Berlin Überbrettl in his earlier
years. The Pierrot lunaire, a study of madness, based on German
translations of seven poems by Albert Giraud and using Sprechgesang, words
half spoken, half sung, was completed in 1912. Back To
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Alban Berg. The
so-called Second Viennese School of Arnold Schoenberg has exercised a
strong influence over the course of music in the 20th century.
Schoenberg's pupils Alban Berg and Anton Webern, each with an individual
musical language, put into practice the general principles of atonality,
music without tonality or key-center, and twelve-note music or surrealism,
music based on a series of the twelve semitones or half-steps of the
modern scale. Berg wrote two important operas, Wozzeck, a study of
insanity, based on the play by Büchner, and the unfinished Lulu, based
on Wedekind. Berg's Violin Concerto and Chamber Concerto are an
important part of 20th century repertoire. His Lyric Suite, for string
quartet, was later orchestrated in part, while the delicately
orchestrated Three Pieces of 1914-1915 form an occasional part of modern
concert repertoire.
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 Webern
began his studies with Schoenberg at the same time he was completing his
studies in musicology (1904–1908). He also conducted various regional
orchestras, and from 1922 to 1934 he conducted the Vienna Workers'
Symphony. Hitler's rise to power in the Thirties and the eventual
forceful annexation of Austria brought great personal hardship to the
composer. In 1933 his mentor, Schoenberg, emigrated to America. Webern's
modernist music was banned, and his works burned. He had to work as a
proofreader in Vienna to avoid forced labor for the Nazis. He died soon
after the war's end, mistakenly shot by an American soldier while
smoking a cigar on the porch of his home. With their self-defined
position as the musical heirs to Beethoven, Brahms, and Mahler, the
composers of the Second Viennese School were firmly grounded in the
music of the past. This is perhaps truest of Anton Webern, who began his
musical career as a doctoral student in musicology, writing a
dissertation on the music of Heinrich Isaac (c. 1450–1517). At the
same time, Webern's music represents the most extreme statement of the
ideals of the twelve-tone method of composition and is the most
fundamentally radical of the three composers' works. Like Berg and
Schoenberg, Webern found his individual voice in the twelve-tone
technique. For Webern, this meant a concentrated contrapuntal style in
which all the elements formed complex relationships. This interest in
the virtuosic possibilities of counterpoint is fully in line with his
scholarly interest in the intensely contrapuntal style of Isaac's sacred
music. Of the three composers' works, Webern's is the most difficult to
approach. However, underneath the spare, seemingly fragile texture is a
language of rich and elegant gesture. His Passacaglia, Op. 1, is a good
example, and more recognizably "Viennese." But even in his
later works, there is a sparse and concentrated lyricism that makes this
music rewarding for the listener who is willing to take the time to hear
it.Back To List |
 Gustav
Mahler, was Born at Kaliste in Bohemia, the son of a Jewish pedlar,
Gustav Mahler later described himself as three times homeless, a
Bohemian in Austria, an Austrian among Germans and a Jew throughout the
world, everywhere an intruder, never welcomed. His principal musical
training was at the Vienna Conservatory, after which he embarked on a
career as a conductor which took him to important positions in Budapest,
Hamburg and finally at the Vienna State Opera, where he made a number of
major reforms. Hostility fomented by sections of the press forced his
resignation in 1907, after which he briefly continued a distinguished
international career as a conductor, notably in New York, until his
death in 1911. As a composer Mahler wrote symphonies that absorbed into
their texture and form the tradition of German song in music that
reflected in many ways the spirit of the time in which he lived, in all
its variety. Mahler completed nine symphonies, leaving a tenth
unfinished, in addition to Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the
Earth), a symphony in all but name, settings of a series of poems
derived from the Chinese. The first of the symphonies, sometimes known
as "Titan", includes a remarkable ironic funeral march that
transforms a nursery tune. Symphonies Nos. 2, 3, 4 and 8 make use of
voices, the last of these on a massive scale. The symphonies, in their
variety of mood, offer a reflection of the world, with music that may
occasionally be garish and yet often reaches unsurpassable heights. In
addition to the vocal element in his symphonies, Mahler wrote a number
of songs of singular beauty, some of which were re-used in orchestral
settings. The songs include settings of poems from the Romantic
anthology Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy's Magic Horn), Lieder eines
fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer) and Rückert's
Kindertotenlieder (Songs of the Death of Children).
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 Charles
Ives was influenced first by his father, a bandmaster who had
libertarian ideas about what music might be. When he was perhaps 19 (the
dating of his music is nearly always problematic) he produced psalm
settings that exploit polytonality and other unusual procedures. He then
studied with Parker at Yale (1894-8) and showed some sign of becoming a
relatively conventional composer in his First Symphony (1898) and songs
of this period. He worked, however, not in music but in the insurance
business, and composition became a weekend activity - but one practiced
assiduously: during the two decades after his graduation he produced
three more symphonies and numerous other orchestral works, four violin
sonatas, two monumental piano sonatas and numerous songs. The only
consistent characteristic of this music is liberation from rule. There
are entirely atonal pieces, while others are in the simple harmonic
style of a hymn or folksong. Some are highly systematic and abstract in
construction; others are filled with quotations from the music of Ives's
youth: hymns, popular songs, ragtime dances, marches etc. Some, like the
Three Places in New England, are explicitly nostalgic; others,
like the Fourth Symphony, are fuelled by the vision of an idealist
democracy. He published his 'Concord' Sonata in 1920 and a volume of 114
songs in 1922, but composed little thereafter. Most of his music had
been written without prospect of performance, and it was only towards
the end of his life that it began to be played frequently and
appreciated. Back To List |
 Arthur
Honegger was Swiss by nationality, Arthur Honegger was born and
died in France, and was for a time associated with the group of Paris
composers known as Les Six, although they were not bound together by
ideals such as those of the Five in 19th century Russia. Honegger was a
prolific composer in many genres, writing for the theatre and concert
hall, as well as for the cinema. Honegger made some impression with his
three symphonic movements, the first of a railway engine, Pacific 231,
followed by Rugby, and a third with the simple title, Movement symphonious.
Works of particular interest include the delightful Piano Concertino and
the Concerto da camera for flute, cor anglais and strings and the
charming Pastorale d'été, scored for chamber orchestra. The second and
third of his five symphonies form part of the concert repertoire. The
dramatic psalm Le roi David, completed in 1921, is an impressive work,
originally theatrical in intention, but transferred effectively to the
concert-hall as an oratorio. Honegger's stage oratorio Jeanne d'Arc au
bûcher (Joan of Arc at the Stake), completed in 1935, using a text by
Paul Claudel, is an equally moving work, powerful in its use of the
human voice, whether in speech or song. Back To List |
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