This document provides an overview of modern classical music (20th century music) and summarizes some of its key developments and characteristics. It explores musical styles like serialism, electronic music, minimalism, experimentalism, and musique concrète. Specific composers and their works are mentioned as examples to illustrate techniques like atonality, pointillism, tone rows, prepared instruments, graphic scores, and electronic/tape music. The text also defines important technical terms and concepts in modern classical music composition.

1. Modern Classical Music
(20th Century Music)
The break down of “classical traditions” through
Exploration and Experimentation

2. Topics
• Expressionism
• Serialism
• Electronic Music
• Minimalism
• Experimental Music
• Atonality
• Pointillism
• Klangfarbenmelodie
• Verticalisation (Note
Clusters)
• Polymetre
• Polyrhythm
• Polytonality
• Twelve tone note row
• Microtonality
• Aleotoric
• Graphic score
• Avant-Garde
• Musique concrète
• Soundscape

3. Serialism
• We move from the whole tone scale (End of the Romantic Period) to the 12 tone note row
Look at the examples below
Prime Order
Inversion (turn it upside down)
Retrograde (Write it backwards)
Retrograde Inversion (Write it upside down and backwards)

4. Prime bar Inversion
Inversion
Tritone
Retrograde

5. Schoenberg is the composer who invented the 12 note
system.
a) The ____ order is heard in the _______ Bars ___ & ___
b) The left hand then plays the ________ of the row in bars
_________
c) The row is then transposed (moved up in intervals) up a
tritone (also known as the devil’s chord) in bars ____ & ____
d) In Bars 8 & 9 we hear the ___________ version is heard
e) followed by the ________ inversion in Bars ___ & ____
f) Together the bass and treble parts of bars 1-6 form a
canon by inversion
g) We can also build chords from the note row. This is
called Verticalisation or Note Clusters

6. Klangfarbenmelodie
• Schoenberg used this term to describe a melody being spread
between different instruments.
• Look at the example from Anton Webern’s “Ricercare” below
• This led to Pointillism (using one note per instrument)

7. Here is an example
from Anton Webern’s
Quartet Op.22
(movement 1)

8. Expressionism
• A term borrowed from painting
• Atonal – total rejection of key or tonality
• Extremely dissonant (notes that clash)
• Frenzied melodies
• Jagged leaps
• Violent explosive contrasts in dynamics
• Extreme changes in tempo, texture, rhythm,
• Instruments played to the extremes of their
ranges
• Unmetered

9. Listen to the following examples of
Expressionism
Arnold Schoenberg’s “Valse de Chopin” from Pierre
Lunaire
These three
tracks are from
Berg’s Wozzeck
(concluding
scenes)
Alban Berg

10. Experimentalism
• Experimental music is any music that
challenges the commonly accepted ideas of
what music is.
• There is an overlap with Avant-Garde (a group
of people that champion this style of music.)
• John Cage was a pioneer in experimental
music and defined and gave credibility to the
form.
• The "experiment" is not whether a piece
succeeds or fails, but is in the fact that the
outcome of the piece is uncertain (or
unforeseeable).

11. Key Characteristics
• Aleatoric music - Also called 'chance music‘.
– Music in which the composer introduces the elements
of chance or unpredictability with regard to either the
composition or its performance.
• Graphic notation - Music which is written in the
form of diagrams or drawings
• Microtones - A pitch interval that is smaller than
a semitone. This includes quarter tones and
intervals even smaller.
Cornelius Cardew “Treatise”

12. Playing Techniques
• Extended techniques: Playing your instrument in unusual ways
(over blowing, scraping, hitting strange parts of the
instrument).
• Listen to this piece by Krzysztof Penderecki called
“Threnody to the victims of Hiroshima”
• "Prepared" instruments—ordinary instruments changed in
their tuning or sound-producing characteristics. For
example, guitar strings can have a weight attached at a
certain point, changing their harmonic characteristics
• John Cage's “prepared piano” was one of the first such
instruments.
• Unusual playing techniques—for example, a dozen or
more piano keys may be pressed at the same time with the
forearm to produce a tone cluster,
• or the tuning pegs on a guitar can be rotated while a note
sounds (called a "tuner glissando").

13. Other experimental tricks
• Using instruments, tunings, rhythms or scales
from non-Western musical traditions e.g Africa,
India, Indonesia, China etc.
• Use of every day sounds other than musical
instruments such as trash cans, telephone ringers,
and doors slamming.
• Playing with deliberate disregard for the
ordinary musical controls (pitch, duration,
volume).
• Use of written/graphic 'instructions' to be actively
interpreted by the performer(s).
Ian
Clarke
“Zoom
Tube”
Meridith Monk “Wa-lie-oh” from “Songs from
the Hill”

14. Extended Vocal techniques
• Tongue Rolling
• Ssh sounds
• Murmuring
• Open vowel sounds
• Gurgling
• Clicks, whistling, inhaling and exhaling sounds
• Shouting
• Declamatory style
• Repeating words
• Syllabic
• Melismatic

15. Peter Maxwell’s Davies
‘The Lady-in-Waiting’
Graphic
Score/
notation

16. Electronic Music
• instruments that produce sound
through electromechanical -
Examples of an electromechanical
instrument are the electric guitar,
Hammond B3, and the
teleharmonium
• instruments that produce sound
using electronic components -
examples of an electronic instrument
are a Theremin, Ondes Martenot
synthesizer, and a computer

17. Musique concrète
• The tape recorder was invented in Germany during
World War II.
• It wasn't long before composers used the tape recorder to
develop a new technique for composition called
Musique concrète.
• This technique involved editing together recorded
fragments of natural and industrial sounds.
• The first pieces of musique concrète were written by
Pierre Schaeffer, who later worked alongside such
avant-garde classical composers as Pierre Boulez and
Karlheinz Stockhausen.
• The first electronic music for magnetic tape composed
in America was completed by Louis and Bebe Barron
in 1950.

18. Introduction of the Synthesizer
• Two new electronic instruments made their debut in
1957.
• The first of these electronic instruments was the
computer when Max Mathews used a program called
Music 1, and later Music 2
• Another playable synthesizer, the first to use a piano
styled keyboard, was the brainchild of Robert Moog.
Mini Moog

19. Sequencer
• a sequencer was originally any device that recorded
and played back a sequence of control information for
an electronic musical instrument.
• Nowadays, the term almost always refers to the feature
of recording software which allows the user to record,
play back and edit MIDI data. This is distinct from the
software features which record audio data.

20. Soundscape
• A soundscape composition is an acoustic environment or
an environment created by sound.
• Natural sounds such as forces of nature and animals,
including humans.
• There are different elements of the soundscape such as
sound signals.
• Sound Signals: warning devices, bells, whistles, horns,
sirens, etc.
• Soundscapes are often combined with the performance of
music.

21. Technical Terms
a. Filtering (EQ) (taking away unwanted frequencies Hi
or Lo)
b. Wavering (adding vibrato)
c. Reverb (Sounds like you are in a big room)
d. Delay (the sounds dies away gradually)
e. Echo (the sounds are repeated as they die away)
f. Chorus (making sounds bigger as if there are lots of the
same instrument or voice
g. Flanging ("whooshing" sound, or a sound similar to the
sound of a jet plane flying overhead.
h. Muting (dampening sounds)
i. Reversing (playing a sound backwards)
j. Pitch Shifting or Bending (sliding sounds)Looping –
sounds repeated like an ostinato

22. Extracts to listen to
Nye Parry – A Passing Phase
David Bedford – The Song of the
White Horse (The Blowing Stone)
Good example of delay on the
trumpets)
Trevor Wishart – Vox 5
Toby Bricheno – Hyde Park

23. Other Modern Music Characteristics
Polytonality – A piece of music played in more than one
key signature at the same time
Polymetre – different time signatures against each other
at the same time
Polyrhythms – two or more difficult rhythms played at
the same time
This is Stravinsky’s “The Harbingers of
Spring” from “The Rite of Spring”

24. Other Famous Modern Composers
Pierre BoulezKarlheinz StockhausenDmitri Shostakovich
Olivier Messiaen Darius Milhaud Ralph Vaughan-Williams
Michael Tippett Maurice Ravel Paul HindemithBenjamin Britten

25. Gustav Holst Carl Orff George Gershwin William Walton
Francis PoulencJohn Tavener Gabriel Faure
Aaron Copland
&
Leonard Berstein

26. The misunderstood genius
“To be a genius is to be misunderstood” – Emerson
The artist out in front, ahead of the audience, the
advanced guard (a military metaphor) –
the avant garde
“Music could quickly come to such a point, that everyone who is
not precisely familiar with the rules and difficulties of the art
would find absolutely no enjoyment in it.”
A critic reviewing the premiere of Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony