Music 1900 - 1945
American jazz is another non-European influence on twentieth-century composers. Musicians were fascinated by its syncopated rhythms and improvisational quality, as well as by the unique tone colors of jazz bands. Unlike a string-dominated symphony orchestra, a jazz band emphasizes woodwinds, brasses, and percussion.Jazz elements were used in works as early as Debussy's Golliwogg's Cake-Walk (from the suite Children's Corner, 1908) and Stravinsky's Ragtime (from The Soldier's Tale, 1918). But the peak of jazz influence came during the "jazz age" of the 1920s, with works such as the ballet La Creation du monde (The Creation of the World, 1923) by the French composer Darius Milhaud and the Piano Concerto (1926) by the American composer Aaron Copland. For Americans, jazz idioms represented a kind of musical nationalism, a search for an "American sound." lor European composers, the incorporation of jazz rhythms and tone colors represented a kind of musical exoticism. During the 1920s and 1930s, popular composers such as George Gershwin (1898-1937) used Jazz and popular elements within "classical'' forms. Gershwin's Rho psady in Blue (1924) and his opera l'orgy and Bess (1934-1935) are well known.Modern composers can also draw inspi
form might be used with harmonies, rhythms, melodies, and tone col- ors that would have been inconceivable before the twentieth century. A cOEull)inatioll til toiìes that earlier would have been used to generate instability and expectation might now be heated as a stable chord, a point (If arrival. CHARACTERISTICS OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY MUSIC Tone ColorDuring the twentieth century, tone color has become a more important element of music than it ever was before. A dissonant chord was unstable; its tension demanded onward motion, or resolution to a stable, consonant chord. But no longer is (here a general principle that determines whether a chord is stable or not. Ihiere is a si)('tial gravitational pull fiouiu (lie dominant chord toward (he tonic chord, amid the motion from douni- nant to tonic is the essential chord progression of the tonal system. There has been a rediscovery of earlier masters such as Perotin and Machaut from the medieval period, Josquin Desprez and Gesualdo from the Renaissance, and Purcell and Vivaldi from the ba- nx1ue. ('Ihe accompaniment for (In' last music example has an eight-note ostimuato: I- 23 -4-5-6-7-8. I Ic avoided traditional chord progressions in these works and used all twelve tones without regard to their traditional relationship to major or minor scales. lit ~,ttitti oviiik';, Itit' It, liluntil i&,I,itu&)uisliui) fu't~v&'o'ii tittiiiui~inI ,iuiol it)uiit' I) i,litS iS it. Many twentieth-century works are written for nonstandard chamber groups made up of instruments with sharply contrasting tone colors. Atonality was foreshadowed iii nimicteenlh-century worksr such as Wagner's Trislan auuu! Isolde, where (lie pull of a central key is weakened by frequent modulations and by liberal use of all twelvef tones iii the chromatic scale.
Common topics in this essay:
Harmony Consonance,
Tone Color,
A1aic1ia II,
Schoenberg's Rapidly,
Percussion Cek'sta,
JJJ Count,
Wr'VL'-IOfle S~SlL'flI,
Benjamin Britten,
Anton Webern,
,
twentieth century,
tone colors,
modern composers,
tone color,
twentieth-century music,
rhythms tone,
rhythms tone colors,
1 2,
2 3,
modern composers draw,
tale 1918,
major role,
twentieth century music,
5 1 2,
1 2 3,
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Acceptance Essays
