Download Evolution - WordPress.com

1. Evolution
1.1. Impressionism
1.2. Expressionism
1.3. New sonority: Stravinsky
2. Rupture
3. The return: Neoclassicism
4. 20th century in Spain
5. New avant-garde movements
6. Contemporary dance
Índice del libro
Evolution
During the 20th century music turned into a diversity of styles
and tendencies that broke with the unity of language, and looked
for a new world of sounds.
Evolution
1.1. Impressionism
In the early 20th century two movements
related to Romanticism were developed:
Impressionism and Expressionims.
Impressionism used music as a subtle and
subjective expression by means of modal
melodies, independent chords and great
timbric color.
The main composers were
Claude Debussy (1862-1918) and
Maurice Ravel (1875-1937).
The name «Impressionism» is based
on the painting by Monet called
Impression,
sunrise showed in the Exposition
Universelle of Paris in 1874.
Evolution
1.2. Expressionism
Expressionism, which looked for a more
brokenhearted expression using «sprechgesang»
and atonal music, full of dissonances.
The most representative composer was Arnold
Schoenberg (1874- 1951).
The Scream by Edward Munch (1895)
was the first example of Expressionism,
movement that reflected mankind’s
conflicts
and fears by showing a distorted
reality, marked by pain and anxiety.
Evolution
1.3. New sonority: Stravinsky
The Russian composer Igor Stravinsky
(1882-1971) marked the beginning
of a truly contemporary sonority that
influenced every composer
of this period.
The great work of Stravinsky that set the
course of the history of music
was the ballet The Rite of Spring, written
in 1913 for The Russian Ballets.
Rupture
The first avant-garde musical
movements appeared in the early 20th
century:
Futurism, which introduced noise and
machines into music.
Dadaism, which rose up against all
established forms of art.
Dodecaphonism, which broke with more
than three hundred years of tonal music
when it introduced equality among the
twelve sounds of the scale.
The return: Neoclassicism
Neoclassicism went back to the cultivation of
baroque and classical forms and genres in the
search for a new type of Simplicity.
It recovered tonality and the importance of
melody in order to get closer to the
audience with pleasant and easy-to-listen
music, without technical complexities and
Jean Cocteau (1899-1963).
emotional excesses.
Among the most important representatives of
Neoclassicism we can
find the French composers Erik Satie (1866-1925).
20th century in Spain
The 20th century meant a crucial thrust for Spanish music due to the
composers that joined the different trends of contemporary music.
The most important composer and the first one who achieved wide
international recognition was Manuel de Falla (1876-1946), main
representative of the so-called «Generation
of ’98» due to his connection with the literary generation.
Falla took Nationalism to its peak but
he was also influenced by other
tendencies like Impressionism and
Neoclassicism.
New avant-garde movements
After World War II, the New Avant-garde movements appeared:
Serialism
Musique concrète
Electronic music
Electroacoustic music
Stochastic music
Applied the concept of series to all parameters of sound.
Movement connected with Futurism that uses any sound or noise
taken from reality. These sounds of «particular objects» are taperecorded.
This music is completely made in a laboratory, in which sounds are
created, processed and recorded electronically.
It is musique concrète together with electronic music.
It was another stage in the development of electronic music that
consisted of the introduction of computers in the field of composition.
Live electronics
These were works that combined live performances of voice and
conventional instruments with recorded music composed in the lab.
Aleatoric music
Supported open works that changed the concept of composition for
the concept of performance.
Contemporany dance
Diaghilev’s
Russian
Ballets
were
the
precursors of contemporary ballet.
Modern dance theatre was based on
emotion and the freedom of its approaches.
Social dance in the 20th century received in
America the influence of black and Latin
rhythms, and the styles of popular music.
It made room for a lot of dances that form
contemporary urban dance nowadays.
Vaslav Nijinsky (1890-1950).
Índice del libro