Dance
Historically, modern dance scholarship has followed the contours of the field as defined by John Martin, the revered dance critic for The New York Times,…
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Music Subject Overview
Musical modernism is understood here in the broadest sense, including compositional practices from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Of course, modernist practice is…
Gandini, Gerardo (1936–2013)
Gerardo Gandini was an Argentinean composer and pianist. Disciple and assistant of Alberto Ginastera in the late 1950s and 1960s, he obtained international recognition for…
de Morais Andrade, Mário Raul (1893–1945)
Often called the pope of Brazilian Modernism, Mário de Andrade spearheaded several different phases of the movement, and is credited with introducing the term modernismo…
Bunting, Basil (1900–1985)
Basil Cheesman Bunting was a British poet, closely associated with Northern England and with late modernist poetics. A close friend of Ezra Pound’s, Bunting worked…
Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, The
The Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music (WarszawskaJesień) is one of Europe’s longest-running festivals of contemporary music. With two exceptions (1957 and 1982), the…
Shankar, Uday (1900–1977)
A legendary dancer often credited as the father of Indian modern dance, Uday Shankar was a visual artist and an astute choreographer with a keen…
Serialism/Twelve-Tone Technique
Serialism or the twelve-tone technique is a way of composing music that involves replacing major and minor scales with a fixed ordering of the pitches…
Patriquin, Donald (1938--)
Donald Patriquin is a composer known chiefly for contributing to choral repertoire in Canada. Born in Sherbrooke, Quebec, he studied composition as a teenager with…
Monk, Thelonious (1917–1982)
Thelonious Monk was an American jazz pianist and composer. One of the earliest performers in the bebop movement of modern jazz dating from the mid-twentieth…
La Création du Monde
A ballet inspired by a creation fable in Blaise Cendrars’s Anthologie nègre (1921), La Création du monde (The Creation of the World) was produced by…
Enríquez Salazar, Manuel (1926–1994)
A. Mexican composer and violinist, Enríquez is regarded as one of the leading figures of the experimental music scene in Mexico during the second half…
Mambo
Mambo music, which emerged in Cuba in the 1940s but was popularized in Mexico City and New York, blended jazz harmonies and instrumentation with Afro-Cuban…
Grupo de Renovacion Musical (1942–1948)
The Grupo de Renovacion Musical was a school of Cuban composers that emerged out of the Conservatorio Municipal de La Habana during the 1940s. The…
Lachenmann, Helmut (Friedrich) (1935--)
One of the most influential composers to emerge from Germany following the post-war avant-garde movement, Helmut Lachenmann has remained committed to the legacy of integral…
Atonality
Atonality refers to the complete absence of tonality in a musical composition. In music, it is often claimed that modernism stands in opposition to classicism…
Ablinger, Peter (1960--)
Peter Ablinger has arguably done more to challenge what we mean by “music” than any composer since John Cage. His works include Sehen und Hören…
Just Intonation
Just intonation is a system of tuning musical intervals based on simple ratios between the frequencies of their constituent pitches. For voices and most musical…
Carter, Elliott (Cook Jr.) (1908–2012)
Born in 1908 into a wealthy New York City family, Elliott Carter enjoyed a cosmopolitan childhood, spending time in Europe and learning French at an…
Antheil George (1900–1959)
George Johann Carl Antheil was an American composer, pianist, author, and inventor. He is best-known for his 1924 composition, Ballet Mechanique, originally scored for sixteen…
Rolland, Romain (1866–1944)
Writer, professor, musicologist, biographer, essayist, novelist, playwright, great letter writer and diarist, mystic in search of a pacified world and of a heroic heart, Romain…
Stockhausen, Karlheinz (1928–2007)
For much of the 1950s and 1960s, the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was an absolutely seminal figure within the European avant-garde. By the mid-1950s, every…
Coleman, Ornette (1930--)
Ornette Coleman is an American jazz alto saxophonist and composer. Coleman is considered one of the founders of the avant-garde movement in jazz, which he…
Thomson, Virgil (1896–1989)
Virgil Thomson was born in Kansas City, Missouri. During his childhood Thomson’s creative and intellectual gifts did not go unnoticed, and with the assistance of…
Pentland, Barbara Lally (1912–2000)
Barbara Pentland was arguably the most rigorously modernist Canadian composer of her generation. During the late 1940s she adopted serial techniques and by the mid-1950s…