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The History of Music,
Second Edition
The Early
Twentieth Century
Teacher’s Guide
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The History of Music, Second Edition
The Early Twentieth Century
Table of Contents
Tabl
INTRODUCTION.........................................................................3
LEARNING OBJECTIVES..................................................................3
TARGET VOCABULARY...................................................................3
DISCUSSION STARTERS...................................................................3
REVIEW QUESTIONS.....................................................................4
TRANSCRIPT............................................................................7
©2005 Clearvue
6465 N. Avondale Avenue
Chicago, IL 60631
800-253-2788 • 773-775-9433
[email protected]
clearvue.com • PowerMediaPlus.com
The History of Music, Second Edition
The Early Twentieth Century
Introduction
During the early twentieth century, people were trying to adjust to such radical technological
advances as the automobile, the airplane, and the motion picture. In this atmosphere, artistic
perceptions changed, and revolutionary experiments took place in music.
The music of the early twentieth century was affected by impressionism, most notably in the use
of tonality. The impressionist style was best demonstrated by Claude Debussy, who considered
tonality in a new light by combining it with other music forms like the scales of Javanese gamelan
music.
Other composers, including Arnold Schoenburg, Alban Berg, and Anton von Webern also experimented with tonality. Igor Stravinsky, on the other hand, explored rhythm in his compositions.
While the composers themselves enjoyed these experimental styles, however, audiences were not
very excited about this new music. For the first time ever, the public started paying more attention to the music of the past than the music being written by contemporary composers.
Learning Objectives
After completing the program and participating in discussion and activities, students will be able
to:
• Explain why the score for the ballet The Rite of Spring led to rioting in Paris;
• Describe impressionistic music, and explain how and why the style was developed;
• Relate facts about such notable composers from the period as Arnold Schoenberg, Claude Debussy,
Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton von Webern, Igor Stravinsky, and Ralph Vaughan Williams;
• Understand the views of early twentieth century composers toward tonality; and
• Discuss the influence of nationalism on music from the early twentieth century.
Target Vocabulary
Claude Debussy
tonality
impressionistic
Arnold Schoenberg
twelve-tone system
Alban Berg
Anton von Webern
Igor Stravinsky
The Firebird
Petrouchka
The Rite of Spring
rhythm
neoclassical
Jean Sibelius
Sir Edward Elgar
Ralph Vaughan Williams
Béla Bartók
Ernest Bloch
Charles Ives
Discussion Starters
1. Ask students to talk about Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, focusing particularly on the riot that
broke out in Paris when the ballet was first performed. What do the students think about this reaction? How would they have reacted? Challenge them to think of other, more modern performances
that have garnered extreme reactions from audiences.
2. To give your students a better idea of what impressionism was, show images of impressionist
art from the early twentieth century. Discuss the feelings that are evoked from impressionist art.
Ask the students if they think that impressionist art and music elicit similar responses. If not, what
reaction do they have to each?
3. Think about the musical tastes during the early twentieth century. Many people preferred music
from past eras. Ask students to talk about the kind of music they like. Do they like any music that
might be considered "old"? Or do they only listen to new music? Have they ever tried listening to a
new kind of music and realized that it's not for them? Why?
3
Review Questions
Use these discussion topics and questions to review the program material.
1. Explain how Claude Debussy's musical influences changed over time. [Claude Debussy, a
young French composer, went to Paris to study music at age eleven. His arrogance annoyed fellow
students; his stubborn resistance to traditional training antagonized teachers. Like many young
musicians, Debussy considered Wagner a hero and made two pilgrimages to Wagner's theater in
Bayreuth. But, in his late twenties, Debussy renounced Wagner and began to follow a path more
in line with the French emphasis on sound itself—a path far removed from the Austro-German
tradition. Debussy rejected a strict approach to tonal organization, instead seeking inspiration
in the gentle, relaxed tonality of Renaissance choral music and in the strange scales of Javanese
gamelan music.] How did Debussy develop impressionistic music? [Debussy discovered that
Mussorgsky, in his opera Boris Godunov, had violated the same academic rules of harmony and
counterpoint that he himself had resisted as a student. Using all these discoveries, Debussy
developed a kind of music that was called impressionistic, appealing to the ear with successions
of delicate, shimmering sounds in the same way that impressionistic painters of the time used
image and color to appeal directly to the eye.] What does Debussy's music sound like? [He used
dissonance freely as sound, not as a state of tension that had to be resolved. Debussy's use of
unusual scales enabled him to create a simpler, more relaxed tonal feeling. He used sounds as colors, abandoning the sonata allegro form, with its themes, motifs, and rules for development. His
music evoked dreamy moods and vague images. Although the Germans barely acknowledged his
existence, Debussy demonstrated ways to look at music that bypassed the crisis in tonal organization created by Wagner and his followers.]
2. Describe the ways in which approaches toward tonality changed over time. [From the late
1700s on, German music was dominated by the principle of tonality. Every theme, every phrase,
every note was related to a particular tonic note. Tonal relationships, as in the tonal contrasts
between the two themes in sonata allegro form, were basic to the music of the classical period—
the time of Haydn and Mozart. Romantic composers retained this principle, finding new ways to
manipulate tonality—chromatic harmony, for example, which both weakened and complicated the
sense of tonality. Tonality as an organizing principle was most strictly observed among Austrian
and German composers. Even the radical Wagner, by toying with the force of tonality, acknowledged the principle. Dissonance was always an important expressive device in the tonal system,
creating tension that resolved into more consonant sounds according to specific patterns. Wagner
and his followers evaded and delayed these resolutions, treating tonality like a rubber band,
pulled and stretched in all directions. This created the feeling of unfulfilled longing that listeners
found so powerful. But a rubber band eventually loses elasticity or breaks. How far could tonality be stretched before it lost its point or broke? This was the critical question facing composers
late in the nineteenth century, especially German composers who preferred a secure theoretical
framework.]
3. How did Austrian and German composers approach tonality? [Composer and artist Arnold
Schoenberg brilliantly mastered the post-Wagnerian style. When he was in his thirties, he decided
that tonality had been stretched as far as it could go. He began writing music in which the sense
of tonality was virtually eliminated. He avoided regular rhythms, disrupting melodic lines with
wide leaps. But Schoenberg felt the need for a theoretical framework to replace the tonal system.
In the 1920s, he developed a technique for writing music without a tonal center, known as the
twelve-tone system. Schoenberg's dissonant music conveyed such a consistent feeling of anxiety
and dread that most listeners were offended, even hostile. But he clung to his convictions with
courage and tenacity. Alban Berg was one of many young musicians who ignored the public view
4
and came to study with Schoenberg. Berg applied Schoenberg's techniques flexibly, retaining a
touch of Viennese romanticism in his music. Anton von Webern was another Schoenberg follower.
Webern's music was highly concentrated, featuring tiny pieces with sparse textures in which great
importance was placed on the tone color of every single note. Although Schoenberg and his students influenced other musicians with their twelve-tone music, it never won public favor.]
4. How was Igor Stravinsky "discovered"? How did his compositions impact the development of
music? [Sergei Diaghilev was a well-known producer who formed the Ballet Russe ballet troupe in
Paris. Stravinsky was discovered by Diaghilev when he was inexperienced and young, and Diaghilev
assigned him the task of writing the score for a full ballet. The Firebird, based on a Russian fairy
tale, proved successful, with colorful, exciting music that showed the influence of both Debussy
and the Russian nationalists. Music for the ballet Petrouchka, a story about three puppets, was
Stravinsky's next assignment. The score captured the wry, touching quality of the tale without
sentimentality and introduced sounds that had not been heard before: vibrant, irregular rhythmic
patterns; crisp, brittle textures; and an almost casual use of unresolved dissonance, quite different from Debussy's soft-edged imagery or Schoenberg's dense complexity.] Why was The Rite of
Spring important to Stravinsky and to the music world? [In his next ballet for Diaghilev—The
Rite of Spring—Stravinsky expanded Debussy's concept of dissonance as sheer sound, rather than
as a state of tension that had to be resolved. His harsh, aggressive dissonance went far beyond
what Debussy had attempted. But, most important, The Rite of Spring gave Stravinsky the opportunity to pursue his interest in rhythm, an aspect of music that European composers had never
deeply explored. Here, rhythm became the prime focus of attention. Melody—primitive and folklike—was secondary, along with counterpoint and other refinements. The Rite of Spring depicted
a pagan ritual that culminated in a human sacrifice. When it was introduced in Paris in 1913,
the reaction was so extreme that a riot broke out, forcing Stravinsky and his colleagues to flee
to safety. In addition to the choreography, the music itself was controversial. Its violent physical energy disturbed many listeners. The controversy surrounding the production made Stravinsky
famous. Before long, The Rite of Spring was hailed as a masterpiece, and composers worldwide
were trying to follow Stravinsky's lead. But Stravinsky didn't stand still. By the time he gained
fame for The Rite of Spring, he was moving in a different direction—combining his lively use of
rhythm with a drier, cooler type of music. Clarity, restraint, and the use of smaller instrumental
groups characterized the style. Because these features recalled the eighteenth century, the music
was labeled neo-classical. Tonality, while present, was not emphasized. Stravinsky's work represented a way of breaking with the past without completely renouncing tonality, as Schoenberg and
his followers had done.]
5. What was Jean Sibelius's musical inspiration? [Jean Sibelius of Finland was among those more
interested in fostering a national musical style. But instead of turning to folk melodies, he turned
for inspiration to ancient legends, composing symphonic poems that seemed to capture the somber grandeur of the Finnish landscape. Sibelius not only became a great national hero, but he also
captured audiences worldwide with his unique vision, expressed in his seven symphonies.]
6. Which British composers were among the few to attain fame? [England was late to establish
its own musical identity. Early on, England developed a pattern of attracting important composers
from other countries. Very few native English composers attained fame. Sir Edward Elgar changed
this pattern. Like Sibelius, Elgar became a national hero, capturing a spirit in his music that people at home were proud to recognize as their own and that people abroad identified as characteristically national. Elgar's symphonies and oratorios blend the influences of Brahms and Strauss
with his own individual style. Their aura of dignity and nobility carries a sense of spirituality and
5
inner sadness under the surface that gives the music greater depth. Ralph Vaughan Williams, an
Englishman some years younger than Elgar who began composing later in life, wrote more overtly
nationalistic music. English folk songs fascinated Vaughan Williams, and he traveled the countryside systematically collecting them as resource material. The choral music that had flourished in
England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries served as another source of inspiration
for the robust, direct musical language of Vaughan Williams. He expressed broad humanitarian
and spiritual concerns through his music, which used consonant harmony without a strong sense of
tonality
tonality.]
7. Which countries did Béla Bartók and Ernest Bloch represent? [The Hungarian composer Béla
Bartók searched for the character of his people in folk songs, which he collected on travels around
the country early in the 1900s. The accents of Hungarian folk music were deeply integrated into
Bartók's complex works, with their vigorous rhythms and harsh dissonance. Bartók used his country's
folk music to expand his artistic development rather than simply to add a national flavor to his
compositions, just as Sibelius and Vaughan Williams did. Swiss composer Ernest Bloch searched for
his identity in his spiritual roots. His early works followed the late romantic style, as Bloch strove
to express his passionate interpretation of the Jewish soul. Bloch moved to the United States during
World War I. As he matured, he absorbed most of the recent trends in European music into his own,
intense, powerful style. Bloch demonstrated that a composer need not be limited to one particular
approach. His music ranges from extreme consonance to extreme dissonance, from strong tonality
to almost no tonality, depending upon the character of a particular work.]
8. Describe the music of American composers during the early twentieth century. [Composers
in the United States, from colonial times on, generally modeled themselves after well-known
Europeans. Even at the turn of the century, they still used Schumann, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky as
models. Charles Ives, the son of an eccentric town bandmaster in Danbury, Connecticut, was one
of the few to resist European influence. Ives was more interested in his father's strange musical
experiments, such as trying to reproduce the sound of a thunderstorm on the piano, or having two
marching bands, playing two separate pieces in two separate places, converge. Realizing he could
not make a living composing experimental music, Ives went into the insurance business, making a
fortune. Writing music in his spare time, he tried to capture the flavor of small-town New England
in collages of hymn tunes, marches, popular songs, and other fragments that flowed together like
images from distant memories. The music of Ives was largely ignored during his lifetime. When it
was discovered, musicians were amazed to find that he had anticipated many techniques considered
innovations when they were later introduced by European composers.]
9. Why did the public favor music from the past during the early twentieth century? [All composers during the early twentieth century were forced to examine their view towards tonality by
systematically destroying it; or focusing on other musical elements, such as tone color or rhythm; or
turning to folk music or past musical styles for inspiration; or embracing the concept of tonality as a
range of possibilities rather than a system to be accepted or rejected. Advocates of each approach
influenced younger composers, which soon resulted in the coexistence of more musical styles
than ever before. Listeners everywhere were confused. Finding the harsher, more dissonant styles
unpleasant, audiences retreated to the eighteenth and nineteenth century music they already knew
and loved. For the first time in history, the public was rejecting the work of contemporary artists in
favor of music from the past.]
6
Transcript
Introduction
Hello, I’m Megan Keith. Welcome to The History of Music, an introduction to the Western classical
music tradition. Part Seven of our series, The Early Twentieth Century, discusses a time when people
were trying to adjust to such radical technological advances as the automobile, the airplane, and
the motion picture. In this atmosphere, artistic perceptions changed, and revolutionary experiments
took place in music.
As the program begins, we will consider the effect that impressionism had on music, most notably on
the use of tonality. In art terms, impressionism refers to a style that uses color to reflect the quality of light and shade in a scene. In early twentieth-century music, the impressionist style was best
demonstrated by Claude Debussy. Debussy approached tonality in different ways, influenced by other
musical styles like Javanese gamelan music.
Arnold Schoenberg took this different approach to tonality even further by eliminating it from his
music. His ideas led to the development of the twelve-tone system, which influenced composers Alban Berg and Anton von Webern. Another composer with his own original ideas about music was Igor
Stravinsky. While not eliminating tonality from his work, Stravinsky experimented with an aspect of
music not yet deeply explored—rhythm.
The development of national music styles continued to flourish in the early twentieth century. Jean
Sibelius of Finland, Sir Edward Elgar and Ralph Vaughan Williams of England, and Charles Ives of the
United States were a few of the composers who looked to their countries and heritage for musical
inspiration.
The experiments in music during the early 1900s were important. Toward the end of the program,
though, we will learn that audiences of the time were not very excited about this new music. For the
first time ever, the public began rejecting the music of modern composers in favor of music from the
past.
Program
The world of music was expanding as the twentieth century approached. As Mahler, Strauss, Dvořák,
and Verdi were contributing in their own ways to this expansion, a young French composer, Claude
Debussy, was trying to find his own identity.
Debussy came to Paris to study music at age eleven. His arrogance annoyed fellow students; his stubborn resistance to traditional training antagonized teachers. Like many young musicians, Debussy
considered Wagner a hero and made two pilgrimages to Wagner’s theater in Bayreuth.
But, in his late twenties, Debussy renounced Wagner and began to follow a path more in line with
the French emphasis on sound itself—a path far removed from the Austro-German tradition. From the
late 1700s on, German music was dominated by the principle of tonality. Every theme, every phrase,
every note was related to a particular tonic note.
Tonal relationships, as in the tonal contrasts between the two themes in sonata allegro form, were
basic to the music of the classical period—the time of Haydn and Mozart.
Romantic composers retained this principle, finding new ways to manipulate tonality—chromatic
harmony, for example, which both weakened and complicated the sense of tonality. Tonality as an
7
organizing principle was most strictly observed among Austrian and German composers. Even the
radical Wagner, by toying with the force of tonality, acknowledged the principle.
Dissonance was always an important expressive device in the tonal system, creating tension that
resolved into more consonant sounds according to specific patterns. Wagner and his followers evaded
and delayed these resolutions, treating tonality like a rubber band, pulled and stretched in all directions. This created the feeling of unfulfilled longing that listeners found so powerful.
But a rubber band eventually loses elasticity or breaks. How far could tonality be stretched before it
lost its point or broke? This was the critical question facing composers late in the nineteenth century,
especially German composers who preferred a secure theoretical framework.
Debussy’s solution was to reject the strict approach to tonal organization altogether. He sought
inspiration in the gentle, relaxed tonality of Renaissance choral music and in the strange scales of Javanese gamelan music. Debussy discovered that Mussorgsky, in his opera Boris Godunov, had violated
the same academic rules of harmony and counterpoint that he himself had resisted as a student. Using all these discoveries, Debussy developed a kind of music that was called impressionistic, appealing to the ear with successions of delicate, shimmering sounds in the same way that Impressionist
painters of the time used image and color to appeal directly to the eye. He used dissonance freely as
sound, not as a state of tension that had to be resolved.
Debussy’s use of unusual scales enabled him to create a simpler, more relaxed tonal feeling. He used
sounds as colors, abandoning the sonata allegro form, with its themes, motifs, and rules for development. His music evoked dreamy moods and vague images. Although the Germans barely acknowledged his existence, Debussy demonstrated ways to look at music that bypassed the crisis in tonal
organization created by Wagner and his followers.
But Austrian and German composers—Arnold Schoenberg, for example—could not avoid the crisis. As
a young man, Schoenberg brilliantly mastered the post-Wagnerian style. An artist as well as a composer, Schoenberg painted this self-portrait. When he was in his thirties, he decided that tonality had
been stretched as far as it could go. He began writing music in which the sense of tonality was virtually eliminated.
This Schoenberg painting reflects some of the feeling evoked by his music, with its harsh, unresolved
dissonance. He avoided regular rhythms, disrupting melodic lines with wide leaps. But Schoenberg
felt the need for a theoretical framework to replace the tonal system. In the 1920s, he developed a
technique for writing music without a tonal center, known as the twelve-tone system.
Schoenberg’s dissonant music conveyed such a consistent feeling of anxiety and dread that most listeners were offended, even hostile. But he clung to his convictions with courage and tenacity.
Alban Berg was one of many young musicians who ignored the public view and came to study with
Schoenberg. Berg applied Schoenberg’s techniques flexibly, retaining a touch of Viennese Romanticism in his music. Anton von Webern was another Schoenberg follower. Webern’s music was highly
concentrated, featuring tiny pieces with sparse textures, in which great importance was placed on
the tone color of every single note. Although Schoenberg and his students influenced other musicians
with their twelve-tone music, it never won public favor.
At about the same time that Schoenberg and Debussy were defying tradition, a new ballet troupe,
the Ballet Russe, was being formed in Paris by the well-known producer Sergei Diaghilev. He discovered an inexperienced, young composer, Igor Stravinsky, seated here next to Debussy. Diaghilev
8
assigned Stravinsky to write the score for a full ballet. The Firebird, based on a Russian fairy tale,
proved successful, with colorful, exciting music that showed the influence of both Debussy and the
Russian nationalists.
Music for the ballet Petrouchka, a story about three puppets, was Stravinsky’s next assignment. The
score captured the wry, touching quality of the tale without sentimentality and introduced sounds
that had not been heard before: vibrant, irregular rhythmic patterns; crisp, brittle textures; and an
almost casual use of unresolved dissonance, quite different from Debussy’s soft-edged imagery or
Schoenberg’s dense complexity.
In his next ballet for Diaghilev—The Rite of Spring—Stravinsky expanded Debussy’s concept of dissonance as sheer sound, rather than as a state of tension that had to be resolved. His harsh, aggressive
dissonance went far beyond what Debussy had attempted. But, most important, The Rite of Spring
gave Stravinsky the opportunity to pursue his interest in rhythm, an aspect of music that European
composers had never deeply explored. Here, rhythm became the prime focus of attention. Melody—
primitive and folk-like—was secondary, along with counterpoint and other refinements.
The Rite of Spring depicted a pagan ritual that culminated in a human sacrifice. When it was introduced in Paris in 1913, the reaction was so extreme that a riot broke out, forcing Stravinsky and his
colleagues to flee to safety. In addition to the choreography, the music itself was controversial. Its
violent physical energy disturbed many listeners. The controversy surrounding the production made
Stravinsky famous. This sketch was done by his contemporary Pablo Picasso, the most influential artist of the twentieth century. Before long, The Rite of Spring was hailed as a masterpiece, and composers worldwide were trying to follow Stravinsky’s lead.
But Stravinsky didn’t stand still. By the time he gained fame for The Rite of Spring, he was moving
in a different direction—combining his lively use of rhythm with a drier, cooler type of music. Clarity,
restraint, and the use of smaller instrumental groups characterized the style. Because these features
recalled the eighteenth century, the music was labeled neo-classical. But its crisply dissonant sound
clearly distinguished it from the style of Mozart and Haydn. Tonality, while present, was not emphasized.
Stravinsky’s work represented a way of breaking with the past without completely renouncing tonality, as Schoenberg and his followers had done. Although these developments had far-reaching effects,
many composers of the time had very different concerns.
Jean Sibelius of Finland was among those more interested in fostering a national musical style. But
instead of turning to folk melodies, he turned for inspiration to ancient legends, composing symphonic poems that seemed to capture the somber grandeur of the Finnish landscape. Sibelius not
only became a great national hero, but he also captured audiences worldwide with his unique vision,
expressed in his seven symphonies.
England was another nation that was late to establish its own musical identity. Early on, England
developed a pattern of attracting important composers from other countries. Very few native English
composers attained fame.
Sir Edward Elgar changed this pattern. Like Sibelius, Elgar became a national hero, capturing a spirit
in his music that people at home were proud to recognize as their own and that people abroad identified as characteristically national.
Elgar’s symphonies and oratorios blend the influences of Brahms and Strauss with his own individual
9
style. Their aura of dignity and nobility carries a sense of spirituality and inner sadness under the
surface that gives the music greater depth.
Ralph Vaughan Williams, an Englishman some years younger than Elgar who began composing later in
life, wrote more overtly nationalistic music. English folk songs fascinated Vaughan Williams, and he
traveled the countryside systematically collecting them as resource material. The choral music that
had flourished in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries served as another source of
inspiration for the robust, direct musical language of Vaughan Williams. Vaughan Williams expressed
broad humanitarian and spiritual concerns through his music, which used consonant harmony without
a strong sense of tonality.
The Hungarian composer Béla Bartók also searched for the character of his people in folk songs,
which he collected on travels around the country early in the 1900s. The accents of Hungarian folk
music were integrated deeply into Bartók’s complex works, with their vigorous rhythms and harsh
dissonance. Bartókk used his country’s folk music to expand his artistic development rather than simply to add a national flavor to his compositions—just as Sibelius and Vaughan Williams did.
Swiss composer Ernest Bloch searched for his identity in his spiritual roots. His early works followed
the late romantic style, as Bloch strove to express his passionate interpretation of the Jewish soul.
Bloch moved to the United States during World War I. As he matured, he absorbed most of the recent
trends in European music into his own intense, powerful style. Bloch demonstrated that a composer
need not be limited to one particular approach. His music ranges from extreme consonance to extreme dissonance, from strong tonality to almost no tonality, depending upon the character of a
particular work.
Composers in the United States, from colonial times on, generally modeled themselves after wellknown Europeans. Even at the turn of the century, they still used Schumann, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky as models.
Charles Ives, the son of an eccentric town bandmaster in Danbury, Connecticut, was one of the few
to resist European influence. Ives was more interested in his father’s strange musical experiments,
such as trying to reproduce the sound of a thunderstorm on the piano or having two marching bands,
playing two separate pieces in two separate places, converge. Realizing he could not make a living
composing experimental music, Ives went into the insurance business, making a fortune.
Writing music in his spare time, he tried to capture the flavor of small-town New England in collages
of hymn tunes, marches, popular songs, and other fragments that flowed together like images from
distant memories. The music of Ives was largely ignored during his lifetime. When it was discovered,
musicians were amazed to find that he had anticipated many techniques considered innovations
when they were later introduced by European composers.
All composers during the early twentieth century were forced to examine their view towards tonality, either systematically destroying it, or focusing on other musical elements, such as tone color or
rhythm, or turning to folk music or past musical styles for inspiration, or embracing the concept of
tonality as a range of possibilities rather than a system to be accepted or rejected.
Advocates of each approach influenced younger composers, which soon resulted in the coexistence
of more musical styles than ever before. Listeners everywhere were confused. Finding the harsher,
more dissonant styles unpleasant, audiences retreated to the eighteenth and nineteenth century
music they already knew and loved. For the first time in history, the public was rejecting the work of
contemporary artists in favor of music from the past.
10