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…
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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…
Montage
As an aesthetic principle, montage, defined as the assemblage of disparate elements into a composite whole often by way of juxtaposition, is most often associated…
Surrealism Overview
Soupault’s publication of Manifeste du Surréalism in 1924. Rising in the wake of the First World War, Surrealism revolted against a world that had become…
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…
Fantômas
The first and most famous of many films based on the eponymous villain created by writers Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, the silent crime serial…
Ulysses
A novel by James Joyce, written between 1914 and 1922, serialized from 1918–1920, and published in book form (to much controversy) in 1922. With T.…
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…
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…
Zigomar
Zigomar was the criminal mastermind of French writer Léon Sazie’s eponymous serial novel, or feuilleton, which appeared in the newspaper Le Matin between 1909 and…
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…
Nono, Luigi (1924–90)
Luigi Nono stands out as one of the most uncompromising modernist composers of the Italian avant-garde. Together with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez, Nono was…
New Musical Resources
New Musical Resources is a book written by Henry Cowell in 1919, unpublished until 1930. In it, Cowell proposes a theory of musical relativity in…
Togni, Camillo (1922–1993)
Camillo Togni was an Italian composer, aesthetician and pianist. Launching a career in the midst of the chaos of World War II, he played his…
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…
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…
Kröpfl, Francisco (1931--)
Francisco Kröpfl is an Argentinean composer and researcher. His work as a pedagogue through the development of several generations of Latin American composers is widely…
Spectralism
Spectralism is a tendency in contemporary art music that takes the material attributes of sound as the point of departure for composition. Originating in France…
Bernstein, Leonard (1918–1990)
Leonard Bernstein was the first American-born conductor to be trained entirely in the United States, and to lead a major symphony orchestra, the New York…
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…
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…
Anton Webern (1883−1945)
Webern was one of the three principal composers of the Second Viennese School. Probably Arnold Schoenberg’s first private pupil and a devoted lifelong friend, he…
Little Magazines
In the history of modernism, little magazines were often the first venues to publish unknown authors who are now considered the leading lights of twentieth-century…
Serge Garant (1929--1986)
Composer, conductor, teacher, radio host, artistic director and music critic, Serge Garant has been one of the main figures in the Canadian contemporary music landscape.…
Chaplin, Charlie (1889–1977)
Charles Spenser Chaplin was born in London on April 16, 1889, and died on Christmas Day, 1977, at home in Corsier-sur-Vevey, Switzerland. He had been…