20th Century Music Audio Timeline Part 1: Classical Music

Impressionism as a musical movement arose around the turn of the century, part of the larger Impressionistic art movement of Monet and pointilism and art that looks better from far away than up close (which could be said to be a reaction to the invention of the camera. Why bother trying to reproduce anything realistically when the camera can do it a million times better than you?).

One of the first prominent figures of the period was Claude Debussy, a French composer whose work is associated with atonality (which is music that has no key) or bitonality, parallel chords (chords that move up or down by the same interval, together), and use of the pentatonic scale (used heavily in rock music, it is a 5-note scale in constrast to the 7 note scale, starting at C they are C, D, E, G, A). By comparison to the music of the previous decade, his work sounds a little less settled because of the lack of a unifying key, but he was very good at creating beautiful harmonies even without the use of a key. His work has elements which seem to harken to the invention of jazz, which you can hear in this piece, "Reflections in the Water."



Another French Impressionist,Maurice Ravel, is probably most famous for his Bolero, but also wrote some songs in which the jazz element (which is not entirely an anachronism, jazz as a form existed during his lifetime, he was a contemporary of Gershwin) is blatantly obvious, such as in his Piano Concerto in G (the one that starts with a whip crack).



For comparison numbers, the Concerto in G was composed around 1930. Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue premiered in 1924. Gershwin probably deserves his own article, but suffice it to say here that he is the one that basically took "jazz off the streets, dolled her up, and took her to the concert hall". Here is the Rhapsody in Blue, because it is awesome, and has one of the best endings of any song, ever.





Gustav Mahler is another prominent composer of the period, who also worked in atonality. Here is his Adagietto from Symphony #5, one of the most beautiful pieces ever written.



Sergei Prokofiev is probably one of the more famous of the 20th century classical composers. He also used tonality in new ways and also introduced an element of dissonance (there are accepted chords that sound nice together because they follow certain harmonies, and any notes that don't fall into this nice sounding harmonic structure is considered dissonant). It is probably easier to illustrate this with an example.



His use of rhythm is very noteworthy also. You can get a further sense of it from his Romeo and Juliet ballet, 1935(give it about 1 minute to kick into the famous part).



Aaron Copland is an American composer who incorporated many elements of American folk music into his own classical style. Here is his "Hoedown" from Rodeo (1942), which is a concert staple nowadays. It has also been used in some kind of processed food commercial.



Aleatoric music developed around the 1950s with John Cage, whose music often left a lot of things up to the discretion of the performer instead of the traditional way of composing, in which every little thing is written down and the performer simply regurgitates it back exactly the way it is written. Some of his pieces just set down a set of notes and told the performer to play them in order but whenever he felt like it, other pieces left a lot of elements of the performance up to chance, such as telling the performer to jingle his car keys.