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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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…
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…
Microtonality
Microtonality refers to any use of pitch that departs from twelve equally-spaced tones per octave (twelve-tone equal temperament), the standard tuning established in Europe since…
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…
Cordero, Roque Jacinto (1917–2008)
Roque Cordero was a Panamanian composer, conductor, and educator, and the only twentieth-century Panamanian composer to gain international recognition. During the 1940s he studied composition…
John Cage (1921–1990)
A leading figure in the twentieth-century avant-garde, John Cage was a prolific composer, writer, and artist. His early works show Schoenberg’s influence in their use…
Miguel Aguilar Ahumada (1931--)
Miguel Aguilar Ahumada is a Chilean composer, academic, and musicologist. His value in the Chilean and Latin American musical panorama lies in his role as…
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…
Paz, Juan Carlos (1897–1972)
Juan Carlos Paz (1897–1972) was an Argentine composer, critic, writer, and self-described “compositional guide” who played a key role in twentieth-century Argentine contemporary music. Known…
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…
Scelsi, Giacinto (1905–1988)
Giacinto Scelsi was an Italian avant-garde composer best known for the single-note style he developed during the 1950s and 1960s, which minimizes harmonic and melodic…
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…
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,…
Kolisch, Rudolf (1896–1978)
Rudolf Kolisch was an Austrian-born violinist, teacher, and conductor. As leader of the Kolisch Quartet he premiered many important chamber works by the Second Viennese…
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.…
Tavener, John Kenneth (1944–2013)
John Tavener was an English composer. He studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where his composition teachers were Lennox Berkeley and David…
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…
Kagel, Mauricio Raúl (1931–2008)
Mauricio Raúl Kagel was an Argentine-German composer. One of the most influential composers of the post-war European avant-garde, Kagel was instrumental during the development from…
Malipiero, Gian-Francesco (1882–1973)
Gian-Francesco Malipiero was an Italian composer whose life spanned an expansive period of Italian history, from the post-Risorgimento years through two disastrous wars and into…
Black Mountain College
Between 1933 and 1957, Black Mountain College served as an unlikely crucible of modernism. Despite its isolated location near Asheville, North Carolina, at various times…
Iturriaga (Romero), Enrique (1918--)
Enrique Iturriaga is a Peruvian composer and music pedagogue. He is one of the lead representatives of the so-called Generación del 50, a Peruvian composers’…
Orrego-Salas, Juan (1919--)
Juan Orrego-Salas was a Chilean composer and musicologist. Born in Santiago, Chile on January 1919, he began his music education in Santiago, while also pursuing…
Dallapiccola, Luigi (1904–1975)
Luigi Dallapiccola was the leading Italian composer of the middle half of the twentieth century, contributing much to the development of musical modernism in Italy…
Balanchine, George (1904–1983)
George Balanchine (Georgii Melitonovich Balanchivadze), arguably the greatest ballet choreographer of the twentieth century, was at once both modernist and traditionalist. Unlike many radical innovators,…