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…
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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…
Expressionism
Expressionism was one of the foremost modernist movements to emerge in Europe in the early years of the twentieth-century. It had a profound effect on…
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…
Boulez, Pierre (1925-2016)
French composer Pierre Boulez was one of the most influential composers of the second half of the twentieth century. His personal development mirrored the history…
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…
Nobre, Marlos (1939–)
Marlos Nobre is a Brazilian composer, pianist, and conductor. His music presents a unique characteristic that combines Brazilian features with advanced compositional techniques. His pluralistic…
Krenek, Ernst (1900–1991)
Ernst Krenek, twentieth-century composer, was born in Vienna in 1900. Krenek composed over 240 works from 1917 until 1989, and his career includes works in…
Lutyens, Elisabeth (1906–1983)
(Agnes) Elisabeth Lutyens, CBE, was an English composer, credited with helping to establish the twelve-tone method of serialism in Britain. Lutyens’s first major composition using…
Adaskin, Murray (1906–2002)
Born in Toronto, Ontario and passing in Victoria, British Columbia, Murray Adaskin was a violinist, composer, and academic whose music was widely performed in Canada.…
Honegger, Arthur (1892–1955)
Composer Arthur Honegger was one of a group of six young French composers, known as Les Six, in the forefront of post-WWI Parisian musical modernism.…
Perle, George (1915–2009)
George Perle (1915–2009) was an American composer and scholar, awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Pulitzer Prize (1986) for his Wind Quintet no. 4, and…
Carrillo (Trujillo), Julián (1875--1965)
Julián Carrillo is recognized as one of the first microtonal composers in the Western art music tradition. His experiments with microtones (intervals smaller than the…
Papineau-Couture, Jean (1916–2000)
Grandson to Quebec’s art music scene pioneer Guillaume Couture (1851–1915), composer Jean Papineau-Couture (1916–2000) played a major role in the development of the province’s musical…
Martinů, Bohuslav (1890–1959)
Bohuslav Martinů (1890–1959). Czech composer of Austro-Hungarian, Czechoslovak and American citizenship. He left his native Polička in Eastern Bohemia in 1906 to study violin at…
Freytag-Loringhoven, Baroness Elsa von (1874 –1927)
Born Else Hildegard Plötz in the German Baltic seaport town of Swinmünde in 1874, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven was an avant-garde poet, performer, visual…
Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund (1903–69)
Born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund to an Italian Catholic mother and an assimilated Jewish father, Adorno would take his mother’s vaguely aristocratic last name. Philosopher, aesthetician,…
Yu Dafu
Best regarded as a member of the vanguard of the ‘New Literature’ movement closely related to the nationalist ‘May Fourth Incident’ in 1919, Yu Dafu…
Domingo Santa Cruz, Wilson (1899–1987)
Wilson Domingo Santa Cruz was a lawyer, composer, and academic. His career was built upon several achievements in formative, artistic, and administrative fields, making him…
Czernowin, Chaya (1957–)
Arguably the most important Israeli composer to emerge in the late twentieth century, Czernowin, born 7 December in Haifa, is much sought after as a composer…
Berg, Alban
Composer Alban Berg (1885–1935) is best-known for his two operas, Wozzeck (premiered 1925) and Lulu (left unfinished but performed in incomplete form until the full…
Weill, Kurt (1900–1950)
Kurt Weill was one of the most inventive and prominent composers for musical theatre during the first half of the twentieth century. He wrote for…
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…
Yeshurun, Avot (1904–1992)
Avot Yeshurun was a renowned Hebrew poet who remained split between two cities throughout his life: his childhood village Krasnistav and the city of Tel-Aviv,…
Modernism and Popular Music
Modernism has an uneasy relationship with popular music and popular culture in general. Many modernist music movements (e.g. the twelve-tone school of Schoenberg) are diametrically…