20th Century Music Essay

7/29/2019 20th Century Music Essay

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The development of music in the20th Century Impressionism, British Mainstream and SerialismBy Harry Haden-Brown

If you listen to a piece of

Baroque music by Bach, Vivaldi

or Purcell, and are familiar with

their works, you may be able to

tell whose is whose, but even a

classically trained ear would find

it hard to distinguish between

Mozart, Salieri, and Clementi!

Despite there being different

types of work be it Sacred or

Secular, Sonatas or Concerti,

much of the composing up until

the Romantic period was done

by the same ‘crowd’, and was

restricted by tonality, structure,

harmony, instrumentation, and

just about every other aspect of

the music. In the middle of the

19th Century composers beganto explore and develop the

freedom that the romantic era

had granted them with. With

tonality being pulled further and

further away from the Tonic-

Dominant rules of the classical

period, and program music

allowing composers to tell a story

or evoke emotion rather than

simply write music for music’s

sake, all this experimentation

was leading to what would be

described by some as music’s

most exciting century yet. The

explosion of genres and ideas

that began in the 1900’s was to

see the definition of music

stretched to it’s very limits in

some cases (Serialism - the idea

of music without tonality, and

experimental and aleatoric

music) and in others taken right

back to it’s roots with the simple

p l a i n c h a n t - e s q u e s a c r e dminimalism work of Arvo Pärt

and John Tavener.

The horror and suffering of

not one, but two world wars at

the beginning of the 20th

century was certainly a reason

society changed so dramatically.

People were searching for ways

to express a whole range of

emotions, not only anger and

upset, but also a sense of

wanting to express hope and

looking to the future. Massive

leaps forward in science,

technology and travel also

contributed to the diversity of

styles with musicians being

subjected to more cultures than

ever. All these factors together

created a fertile and turbulent

platform which gave birth to

many o f today s g rea te s t

composers and was a catalyst for

the wide variety and rapiddevelopment of music which has

undoubtably shaped and formed

the music we create today.

MODERNMUSIC

“I am quite certain inmy heart of heartsthat modern musicand modern art is nota conspiracy, but is aform of truth andintegrity for those whopractice it honestly,decently and with alltheir being.”

-Sir Michael Tippett

M a r c h 2 0 1 3

H a r r y H a d e n - B r o w n



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M O D E R N M U S I C

M a r c h 2 0 1 3

Debussy’s ‘Lacathédrale engloutie’The Sunken Cathedral

Many of the influences of Gamelan can

be directly heard in Debussy’s tenth

prelude ‘La cathédrale engloutie’. Notable

examples are his use of the Eastern

pentatonic scale heard extensively in

Javanese music, and also his use of

pedals. In the excerpt shown below a

low ostinato is to be played an octave

lower than written and pedaled heavily.

The low rumbling sonority this

technique produces is very reminiscent

of the lower Gamelan Gongs and there

are countless other examples of drones

being played very low in the pianos

range in the rest of the piece.

The ambiguous musical direction flottant

et sourd (Floating and muffled - written

in French, not Italian as was previously

most common) along with other

directions such as Peu à peu sortant de la

brume (emerging from the fog little by

little) show how focussed Debussy was

at portraying the exact character and

mood he envisaged. Another feature

very typical of Debussy was his use of

parallel movement. Despite being

avoided at all costs in the Baroque and

classical periods, it was used by many

composers in the 20th Century as italludes to a much earlier musical

period, the parallel fifths very similar to

9th Century Organum or Middle-Age

Plainchant.

Impressionismand Claude Debussy

Of course, it wasn’t just the music

world that was being completely

renovated and turned on it’s head in

th e 20 th Ce nt u r y, th e t e rm

impressionism was originally used to

describe the paintings of Monet, andwas ironically used in a negative

fashion, referring to the vague nature

of his work and his lack of precision,

conciseness and reality.

This ideology and approach to

painting in the example of Monet was

mirrored musically by one of France’s

most well-known and influential

composers, Claude Debussy. Short

thick strokes in impressionist art are

meant to capture the essence of a

subject rather than it’s details, and it isthis sense of attempting to portray and

evoke emotions, and experiences rather

than simply describe them that Debussy

encapsulated in his music, although that

isn’t to say that any elements of

Debussy’s music or Impressionism as a

whole are thoughtless, on the contrary,

many of his performance directions,

tempo markings and orchestrations are

very specific. As opposed to losing any

detail, Debussy simply broke the pre

established rules regarding structure and

tonality in order to write his music

purely as he wanted to hear it,

something that other composers in the

late romantic period had dipped their

feet into, but not necessarily gone the

whole way. Born in 1862, Debussy

straddled and no-doubt led the

transition between romantic and

modern music, and, inspired by

Gamelan music at the 1889 Exposition

in Paris sought to “free it [music] from

barren traditions which stifle it”. This

Indonesian music, which must have

seemed very strange to those only

accustomed to Western Classical music,

really ignited Debussy’s imagination.

Debussy refers to Western Tonal music

as goal-orientated, and designed to

carefully develop musical ideas, whereas

he found the world music exposed to

him in 1889 was about timelessness,

death and rebirth, and rising and falling.

His use of static harmony and lack of

strict tonality reflect the ambient drones

of the lower gongs and meditative

repetition heard in Gamelan, although

his use of ostinati and pedals only occur

for several phrases at a tim they are

certainly a distinct feature of his music.

“Some people wish

above all to conform to

the rules, I wish only to

render what I can hear.

There is no theory. You

have only to listen.

Pleasure is the law.”

Claude Debussy

About the image

The image Debussy seeks to convey is a Celtic

folk-tale about a sunken, or submerged,Cathedral which occasionally rises above thesurface. Chanting monks, church bells, andthe grand organ can all be heard, althoughsometimes muffled by the water.



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“Art for art's sake has never flourished in

England. We are often called inartistic

because our art is unconscious. Our

drama and poetry, like our laws and our

constitution, have evolved by accident

while we thought we were doing

something else, and so it will be with

music. The composer must not shuthimself up and think about art, he must

live with his fellows and make his art an

expression of the whole life of the

community – if we seek for art we shall not

find it.”

Ralph Vaughan Williams

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British Mainstream

and Ralph Vaughan Williams


M a r c h 2 0 1 3



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“...if it is art, it is not for all, and if it is

for all, it is not art.”

Arnold Schönberg

Serialismand Arnold Schönberg


M a r c h 2 0 1 3

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20th Century Music Essay