20th-century music

20th century music is defined by the sudden emergence of advanced technology for recording and distributing music as well as dramatic innovations in musical forms and styles. Because music was no longer limited to concerts, opera-houses, clubs, and domestic music-making, it became possible for music artists to quickly gain global recognition and influence. Twentieth-century music brought new freedom and wide experimentation with new musical styles and forms that challenged the accepted rules of music of earlier periods. Faster modes of transportation allowed musicians and fans to travel more widely to perform or listen. Amplification permitted giant concerts to be heard by those with the least expensive tickets, and the inexpensive reproduction and transmission or broadcast of music gave rich and poor alike nearly equal access to high quality music performances.

1.ClassicalMain article: 20th century classical music Composer Igor Stravinsky as drawn by Picasso

In the early 20th century many composers, including Rachmaninoff, Richard Strauss, Giacomo Puccini, and Edward Elgar, continued to work in forms and in a musical language that derived from the 19th century. However, modernism in music became increasingly prominent and important; among the most important modernist precursors were Alexander Scriabin, Claude Debussy, and the post-Wagnerian composers such as Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, who experimented with form, tonality and orchestration. Busoni, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Schreker were already recognized before 1914 as modernists, and Ives was retrospectively also included in this category for his challenges to the uses of tonality.

Others such as Francis Poulenc and the group of composers known as Les Six wrote music in opposition to the Impressionistic and Romantic ideas of the time.[citation needed] Composers such as Ravel, Milhaud, and Gershwin combined classical and jazz idioms. Others, such as Prokofiev, Hindemith, Shostakovich, and Villa-Lobos expanded the romantic palette to include more dissonant elements.

Late-Romantic nationalism was found also in British, American, and Latin-American music of the early 20th century. Composers such as Ralph Vaughan Williams, Aaron Copland, Carlos Chávez, and Heitor Villa-Lobos used folk themes collected by themselves or others in many of their major compositions.

Many composers sought to break from traditional performance rituals by incorporating theater and multimedia into their compositions, going beyond sound itself to achieve their artistic goals.[citation needed]

Minimalism, involving a simplification of materials and intensive repetition of motives began in the late 1950s with the composers Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass. Later, minimalism was adapted to a more traditional symphonic setting by composers including Reich, Glass, and John Adams. Minimalism was practiced heavily throughout the latter half of the century and has carried over into the 21st century, as well as composers like Arvo Pärt, Henryk Górecki and John Tavener working in the holy minimalism variant. For more examples see List of 20th century classical composers.

More About Minimal music :

Minimal music is a style of music associated with the work of American composers La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass.It originated in the New York Downtown scene of the 1960s and was initially viewed as a form of experimental music called the New York Hypnotic School.Prominent features of the style include consonant harmony, steady pulse (if not immobile drones), stasis or gradual transformation, and often reiteration of musical phrases or smaller units such as figures, motifs, and cells. It may include features such as additive process and phase shifting. Minimal compositions that rely heavily on process techniques that follow strict rules are usually described using the term process music.

Starting in the early 1960s as a scruffy underground scene in San Francisco alternative spaces and New York lofts, minimalism spread to become the most popular experimental music style of the late 20th century. The movement originally involved dozens of composers, although only five (Young, Riley, Reich, Glass, and later John Adams) emerged to become publicly associated with American minimal music. In Europe, the music of Louis Andriessen, Karel Goeyvaerts, Michael Nyman, Gavin Bryars, Steve Martland, Henryk Górecki, Arvo Pärt, and John Tavener exhibits minimalist traits.

Steve Reich and at least two critics, Jonathan Bernard[citation needed] and Dan Warburton, suggest the origin of the term "minimal music" might be attributable to Michael Nyman while Philip Glass believes Tom Johnson coined the phrase.

Brief history

The word "minimalism" was first used in relation to music in 1968 by Michael Nyman in a review of Cornelius Cardew's piece The Great Learning. Nyman later expanded his definition of minimalism in music in his 1974 book Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. Tom Johnson, one of the few composers to self-identify as minimalist, also claims to have been first to use the word as new music critic for The Village Voice. He describes "minimalism":

The idea of minimalism is much larger than most people realize. It includes, by definition, any music that works with limited or minimal materials: pieces that use only a few notes, pieces that use only a few words of text, or pieces written for very limited instruments, such as antique cymbals, bicycle wheels, or whiskey glasses. It includes pieces that sustain one basic electronic rumble for a long time. It includes pieces made exclusively from recordings of rivers and streams. It includes pieces that move in endless circles. It includes pieces that set up an unmoving wall of saxophone sound. It includes pieces that take a very long time to move gradually from one kind of music to another kind. It includes pieces that permit all possible pitches, as long as they fall between C and D. It includes pieces that slow the tempo down to two or three notes per minute.

The most prominent minimalist composers are John Adams, Louis Andriessen, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young.

The early compositions of Glass and Reich are somewhat austere, with little embellishment on the principal theme. These are works for small instrumental ensembles, of which the composers were often members. In Glass's case, these ensembles comprise organs, winds—particularly saxophones—and vocalists, while Reich's works have more emphasis on mallet and percussion instruments. Most of Adams's works are written for more traditional classical instrumentation, including full orchestra, string quartet, and solo piano.

The music of Reich and Glass drew early sponsorship from art galleries and museums, presented in conjunction with visual-art minimalists like Robert Morris (in Glass's case), and Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman, and the filmmaker Richard Snow (in Reich's case).

Early development

The music of Moondog of the 1940s and '50s, which was based on counterpoint developing statically over steady pulses in often unusual time signatures, had a

strong influence on many early minimalist composers. Philip Glass has written that he and Reich took Moondog's work "very seriously and understood and appreciated it much more than what we were exposed to at Juilliard".

In 1960, Terry Riley wrote a string quartet in pure, uninflected C major. In 1963, Riley made two electronic works using tape delay, Mescalin Mix and The Gift, which injected the idea of repetition into minimalism. In 1964, Riley's In C made persuasively engaging textures from layered performance of repeated melodic phrases. The work is scored for any group of instruments. In 1965 and 1966 Steve Reich produced three works—It's Gonna Rain and Come Out for tape, and Piano Phase for live performers—that introduced the idea of phase shifting, or allowing two identical phrases or sound samples played at slightly differing speeds to repeat and slowly go out of phase with each other. Starting in 1968 with 1 + 1, Philip Glass wrote a series of works that incorporated additive process (form based on sequences such as 1, 1 2, 1 2 3, 1 2 3 4) into the repertoire of minimalist techniques; these works included Two Pages, Music in Fifths, Music in Contrary Motion, and others. By this point, development of a minimalist style was in full swing.

Minimalism in pop music

Minimal music is also present in pop music. Psychedelic rock acts of the 1960s and 1970s used repetitive structures and droning techniques to express the hallucinations of LSD and other drugs in a musical language. The Velvet Underground had an especially close connection with minimal music, rooted in the close working relationship of John Cale and La Monte Young, who strongly influenced Cale's work with his rock band.

The later progressive rock, experimental rock,art rock, krautrock and avant-prog genres also began exploring minimal music techniques, including groups and artists such as The Soft Machine, King Crimson, Brian Eno, Robert Fripp and Mike Oldfield. In the 1980s and 1990s, artists working in alternative rock, shoegazing, post rock, and other genres, including the bands Spacemen 3, Experimental Audio Research, and Explosions in the Sky, all used minimal music to inform their song structures instead of conventional pop verse-chorus-verse patterns.

Following the minimal electronic music of Brian Eno and the krautrock band Tangerine Dream, 1990s electronic dance music was influenced by changes in technology that lead to the use of production methods minimalism and was based on repetitive instrumental structures, especially the genres of trance, minimal techno and ambient.[citation needed] Well-known artists include The Orb, Orbital, Underworld and Aphex Twin.

Sherburne (2006) suggests that the noted similarities between minimal forms of dance music and American minimalism could easily be accidental. Much of the

music technology used in EDM has traditionally been designed to suit loop based compositional methods, which may explain why certain stylistic features of minimal techno and other forms of electronic dance music sound similar to minimal art music.One group who clearly did have an awareness of the American minimal tradition is the British Ambient act The Orb. Their 1990 production Little Fluffy Clouds features a sample from Steve Reich's work Electric Counterpoint (1987). Further acknowledgement of Steve Reich's possible influence on EDM came with the release in 1999 of the Reich Remixed[19] tribute album which featured reinterpretations by artists such as DJ Spooky, Mantronik, Ken Ishii, and Coldcut, among others.

Minimalist style in music

Leonard Meyer described minimal music in 1994:

Because there is little sense of goal-directed motion, [minimal] music does not seem to move from one place to another. Within any musical segment there may be some sense of direction, but frequently the segments fail to lead to or imply one another. They simply follow one another.[20]

David Cope (1997) lists the following qualities as possible characteristics of minimal music:

Silence Concept music Brevity Continuities: requiring slow modulation of one or more parameters

[implying length] Phase and pattern music, including repetition [implying length]

Consonant harmony is a much noted feature[weasel words]: it means the use of intervals which in a tonal context would be considered to be "stable", that is the form to which other chords are resolved by voice leading. The "texture" of much minimalist music is based on canonic imitation, exact repetitions of the same material, offset in time. Famous pieces that use this technique are the number section of Glass' Einstein on the Beach and Adams' Shaker Loops.

These traits have precedents in the history of European music—Richard Wagner, for instance, opened his opera Das Rheingold with several minutes of static tonality on an E-flat chord, with a linear crescendo of figurations.[citation needed]

Critical reception of minimalism

Ian MacDonald says that minimalism is the "passionless, sexless and emotionally blank soundtrack of the Machine Age, its utopian selfishness no more than an expression of human passivity in the face of mass-production and The Bomb".

On the other hand, Kyle Gann, himself a minimalist composer, has argued that minimalism represented a predictable return to simplicity after the development of an earlier style had run its course to an extreme and unsurpassable complexity. Parallels include the advent of the simple Baroque continuo style following elaborate Renaissance polyphony and the simple early classical symphony following Bach's monumental advances in Baroque counterpoint. In addition, critics have often overstated the simplicity of even early minimalism. Michael Nyman has pointed out that much of the charm of Steve Reich's early music had to do with perceptual phenomena that were not actually played, but resulted from subtleties in the phase-shifting process. In other words the music often does not sound as simple as it looks.

In Gann's further analysis, during the 1980s minimalism evolved into less strict, more complex styles such as postminimalism and totalism, breaking out of the strongly framed repetition and stasis of early minimalism, and enriching it with a confluence of other rhythmic and structural influences.

Notable composers

Notable minimalist composers include:

John Adams (born in the US) Louis Andriessen (born in the Netherlands) David Behrman (born in Austria) Barbara Benary (born in the US) David Borden (born in the US; and his ensemble Mother Mallard's

Portable Masterpiece Company) Gavin Bryars (born in the UK) Joseph Byrd (born in the US) Tony Conrad (born in the US) Julius Eastman (born and died in the US) Ludovico Einaudi (born in Italy) Brian Eno (born in the UK) Frans Geysen (born in Belgium) Jon Gibson (born in the US) Philip Glass (born in the US) John Godfrey (composer) (born in the UK) Karel Goeyvaerts (born and died in Belgium) Henryk Górecki (born in Poland) Michael Harrison (born in the US) Christopher Hobbs (born in the UK) Terry Jennings (born and died in the US) Scott Johnson (born in the US) Douglas Leedy (born in the US) Angus MacLise (born in the US, died in Kathmandu) Richard Maxfield (born and died in the US)

Robert Moran (born in the US) Phill Niblock (born in the US) Michael Nyman (born in the UK) Mike Oldfield (born in the UK) Pauline Oliveros (born in the US) Charlemagne Palestine (born in the US) Rabinovitch-Barakovsky (born in Russia) Steve Reich (born in the US) Terry Riley (born in the US) Arthur Russell (born in the US) Howard Skempton (born in the UK) Dave Smith (born in the UK) Ann Southam (born in Canada) Yoshi Wada (born in Japan) John White (born in the UK) La Monte Young (born in the US)

More about Holy minimalism

Holy minimalism, mystic minimalism, spiritual minimalism, or sacred minimalism are terms used to refer to a number of late-twentieth-century composers of Western classical music, whose works are distinguished by a minimalist compositional aesthetic and a distinctly religious or mystical subject focus.

With the growing popularity of minimalist music in the 1960s and 1970s, which often broke sharply with prevailing musical aesthetics of serialism and aleatoric music, many composers, building on the work of such minimalists as Terry Riley, Philip Glass and Steve Reich, began to work with more traditional notions of simple melody and harmony in a radically simplified framework. This transition was seen variously as an aspect of musical post-modernism or as neo-romanticism, that is a return to the lyricism of the nineteenth century.

In the 1970s and continuing in the 1980s and 1990s, several composers, many of whom had previously worked in serial or experimental milieux, began working with similar aesthetic ideals - radically simplified compositional materials, a strong foundation in tonality or modality, and the use of simple, repetitive melodies - but included with them an explicitly religious orientation. Many of these composers looked to Renaissance or medieval music for inspiration, or to the music of the Eastern Orthodox Churches, some of which used only a cappella music in their services. Examples include Arvo Pärt (an Estonian Orthodox), John Tavener (a British composer who converted to Russian Orthodoxy), Henryk Górecki (a Polish Catholic), Alan Hovhaness (the earliest mystic minimalist), Sofia Gubaidulina, Giya Kancheli, Hans Otte, Pēteris Vasks and Vladimír Godár.

Despite being grouped together, the composers tend to dislike the term, and are by no means a "school" of closely-knit associates. Their widely differing nationalities, religious backgrounds, and compositional inspirations make the term problematic, but it is nonetheless in widespread use, sometimes critically, among musicologists and music critics, primarily because of the lack of a better term. "Neo-Contemplative Music" is one example of a suitable alternative.

Recordings have played a major role in the popularization of the term, as all three of the most well-known "holy minimalists" have had significant success with CD sales.[5] A 1992 recording of Górecki's 1976 piece, Symphony No. 3, sold over a million copies.[6] John Tavener has had several recordings of his works nominated for the Mercury Music Prize, and Pärt has a long-term contract with ECM Records, ensuring consistent and wide distribution of recordings of his works.

2.Contemporary classical music

In the broadest sense, contemporary music is any music being written in the present day. In the context of classical music the term is informally applied to music written in the last half century or so, particularly works post-1960, though standard reference works do not consistently follow this definition. Since it is a word that describes a movable time frame, rather than a particular style or unifying idea, there are no universally agreed on criteria for making these distinctions.

Many composers working the early 21st century were prominent figures in the 20th century. Some younger composers such as Oliver Knussen, Thomas Adès, and Michael Daugherty did not rise to prominence until late in the 20th century. For more examples see List of 21st century classical composers.

More in Contemporary classical music

Contemporary classical music can be understood as belonging to the period that started in the mid-1970s with the retreat of modernism.[1] However, the term may also be employed in a broader sense to refer to all post-1945 modern musical forms.

Categorization

Generally "contemporary classical music" amounts to:The modern forms of art music The post-1945 modern forms of post-tonal music after the death of Anton Webern (including serial music, electroacoustic music, musique concrète, experimental music, atonal music, minimalist music, etc.)the post-1975 forms of this music (including post-modern music, Spectral music, post-minimalism, sound art, etc.)

Historybackground

At the beginning of the 20th century, composers of classical music were experimenting with an increasingly dissonant pitch language, which sometimes yielded atonal pieces. Following World War I, as a backlash against what they saw as the increasingly exaggerated gestures and formlessness of late Romanticism, certain composers adopted a neoclassic style, which sought to recapture the balanced forms and clearly perceptible thematic processes of earlier styles; see also New Objectivity and Social Realism). After World War II, modernist composers sought to achieve greater levels of control in their composition process (e.g., through the use of the twelve tone technique and later total serialism). At the same time, conversely, composers also experimented with means of abdicating control, exploring indeterminacy or aleatoric processes in smaller or larger degrees.Technological advances led to the birth of electronic music. Experimentation with tape loops and repetitive textures contributed to the advent of minimalism. Still other composers started exploring the theatrical potential of the musical performance (performance art, mixed media, fluxus).1945–75

To some extent, European and the US traditions diverged after World War II. Among the most influential composers in Europe were Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. The first and last were both pupils of Olivier Messiaen. The dominant aesthetic at this time was integral or 'total' serialism, which took the ideas of Anton Webern as a model and became increasingly focussed on complexity.

In America composers like Milton Babbitt, John Cage, Elliott Carter, Henry Cowell, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, George Rochberg, and Roger Sessions, formed their own ideas. Many of these composers represented a new methodology of experimental music, which began to question fundamental notions of music such as notation, performance, duration, and repetition, while others fashioned their own extensions of the twelve-tone serialism of Schoenberg.

Developments since the 1970s

Since the 1970s there has been increasing stylistic variety, with far too many schools to count, name or label. However, in general, there are two broad trends.The first is the continuation of modern avant-garde musical traditions and experimental music.The second are schools that seek to revitalize tonal style found in traditional western music.

MovementsModernism

Many of the key figures of the high modern movement are alive, or only recently deceased, and there is also still an extremely active core of composers (e.g., Elliott Carter), performers, and listeners who continue to advance the ideas and forms of Modernism.

Serialism is one of the most important post-war movements among the high modernist schools. Serialism, more specifically named "integral" or "compound" serialism, was led by composers such as Pierre Boulez, Bruno Maderna, Luigi Nono, and Karlheinz Stockhausen in Europe, and by Milton Babbitt, Donald Martino, and Charles Wuorinen in the United States. Some of their compositions use an ordered set or several such sets, which may be the basis for the whole composition, while others use "unordered" sets for the same purpose. The term is also often used for dodecaphony, or twelve-tone technique, which is alternatively regarded as the model for integral serialism.

Active modernist composers include Harrison Birtwistle, Alexander Goehr, Thomas Adès, Magnus Lindberg and Gunther Schuller.

Electronic musicComputer music

Between 1975 and 1990, a shift in the paradigm of computer technology had taken place, making electronic music systems affordable and widely accessible. The personal computer had become an essential component of the electronic musician’s equipment, entirely superseding analog synthesizers and fulfilling the traditional functions of the computer in music for composition and scoring, synthesis and sound processing, control over external synthesizers and other performance equipment, and the sampling of audio input.

Spectral music

Epitomized by the works of such composers as Hugues Dufourt, Gérard Grisey, Tristan Murail, and Horaţiu Rădulescu, "spectral music" implies the use of the spectrum of a sound as a basis of composition.

A number of spectral composers are from Romania; these include Iancu Dumitrescu, Octav Nemescu, Ana-Maria Avram, Costin, Calin Ioachimescu, and Corneliu Cezar. Other spectral composers include Philippe Hurel, Michael Levinas, and Phillippe Leroux, Joshua Fineberg, and Julian Anderson.

Post-modernism

The influence of postmodernism in music is vast,[citation needed] but the definition of what constitutes "postmodern music" is open to interpretation.

Musicians often associated with the term include: Scottish composer James MacMillan (who draws on sources as diverse as plainchant, South American 'liberation theology', Scottish folksongs, and Polish avant-garde techniques of the 1960s), the American Michael Torke (drawing on European music of the early 19th century, minimalism, jazz, and popular music),and Mark-Anthony Turnage from the UK (drawing from jazz, rock, Stravinsky, and Berg).

Polystylism (eclecticism)

Some authors equate polystylism with eclecticism, while others make a sharp distinction.[15] Polystylism is the use of multiple styles or techniques of music, sometimes within the same composition, and is seen as a postmodern characteristic. Polystylist composers include Luciano Berio, William Bolcom, Peter Maxwell Davies, Sofia Gubaidulina, Hans Werner Henze, George Rochberg, Frederic Rzewski, Alfred Schnittke, Frank Zappa and John Zorn.

Historicism

Musical historicism—the use of historical materials, structures, styles, techniques, media, conceptual content, etc., whether by a single composer or those associated with a particular school, movement, or period—is evident to varying degrees in minimalism, post-minimalism, world-music, and other genres in which tonal traditions have been sustained or have undergone a significant revival in recent decades. Some post-minimalist works employ medieval and other genres associated with early music, such as the "Oi me lasso" and other laude of Gavin Bryars. Other composers have assimilated elements of medieval, renaissance, baroque, classical, or romantic styles in varying degrees, including Benjamin Bagby, Thomas Binkley, Easley Blackwood, René Clemencic, Joseph Dillon Ford, Vladimir Godar, Ladislav Kupkovič, Winfried Michel, George Rochberg, Christopher Rouse and Jordi Savall.

Peter Schickele wrote works that parody many different styles of classical music and often draws upon specific works for its inspiration. They were mostly published as albums under the name of P. D. Q. Bach, a composer he invented and then pretended to have discovered among the children of J.S. Bach. Some of these works are published under his own name, however, such as Eine Kleine Nichtmusik a work which layers quotes from other classical music and many folk melodies over the top of a complete performance of Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.

The historicist movement is closely related to the emergence of musicology and the Early Music Revival. A number of historicist composers have been influenced by their intimate familiarity with the instrumental practices of earlier periods

(Hendrik Bouman, Grant Colburn, Michael Talbot, Alexandre Danilevsky, Paulo Galvão, Roman Turovsky-Savchuk). The musical historicism movement has also been stimulated by the formation of such international organizations as the Delian Society and Vox Saeculorum.

Neo-romanticism

The vocabulary of extended tonality, which flourished in the late 19th and very early 20th centuries, continues to be used throughout the contemporary period. It never has been considered shocking or controversial in the larger musical world—as has been demonstrated statistically for the United States, at least (Straus 1999, 322–29, et passim). Composers who have worked in the neoromantic vein after 1975 include John Williams, John Corigliano, George Rochberg (in some of his works), David Del Tredici, Ladislav Kupkovič, Gian Carlo Menotti, Krzysztof Penderecki, Isang Yun, Christopher Rouse, Lorenzo Ferrero, and Ennio Morricone

Art rock influence

Similarly, many composers have emerged since the 1980s who are heavily influenced by art rock. Many, such as Scott Johnson, Steven Mackey, and Tim Hodgkinson, started out as rock musicians and only later moved into the realm of scored music. Other notable composers who draw on rock include Christopher Rouse, Marc Mellits, Evan Ziporyn, Julia Wolfe, Michael Gordon, David Lang, Elliott Sharp, John Zorn, Steve Martland, Anne LeBaron, Paul Dresher, Kitty Brazelton, Rhys Chatham,[18] Glenn Branca, Erkki-Sven Tüür, Robert Paterson, Annie Gosfield, Randall Woolf and Nick Didkovsky. Many of these composers (Gordon, Lang, Mellits, Dresher, Wolfe, Ziporyn, Martland, Branca) are post-minimalist in orientation, but some (Didkovsky, Brazelton and Rouse) are very much not.

"World music" influence

Some composers mix western and non-western instruments, including gamelan from Indonesia, Chinese traditional instruments, ragas from Indian Classical music. There is also an exploration of eastern-European and non-Western tonalities, even in relatively traditionally structured works. This trend was present already in the 1920s and 1930s, for example in the music of Béla Bartók, Henry Cowell, Colin McPhee, Alan Hovhaness, and Lou Harrison, and slightly later in the work of Olivier Messiaen, Chou Wen-chung, Halim El-Dabh, and Peggy Glanville-Hicks. The trend can be found also in the context of post-minimalist works, such as Janice Giteck's and Evan Ziporyn's Balinese-influenced works. Some composers have used traditional instruments from their own cultures, such as Tōru Takemitsu, Minoru Miki, Chen Yi, Zhou Long, or Julian Kytasty. World music influence may also be found in the context of post-classic tonality, such as

in the music of Bright Sheng, or in the context of thoroughly modernist works by composers such as Claude Vivier.

New Simplicity

A movement in Denmark (Den Ny Enkelhed) in the late nineteen-sixties and another in Germany in the late seventies and early eighties, the former attempting to create more objective, impersonal music, and the latter reacting with a variety of strategies to restore the subjective to composing, both sought to create music using simple textures. The German New Simplicity's best-known composer is Wolfgang Rihm, who strives for the emotional volatility of late 19th-century Romanticism and early 20th-century Expressionism. Called Die neue Einfachheit in German, it has also been termed "New Romanticism", "New Subjectivity", "New Inwardness", "New Sensuality", "New Expressivity", and "New Tonality".

Styles found in other countries sometimes associated with the German New Simplicity movement include the so-called "Holy Minimalism" of the Pole Henryk Górecki and the Estonian Arvo Pärt (in their works after 1970), as well as Englishman John Tavener, who unlike the New Simplicity composers have turned back to Medieval and Renaissance models, however, rather than to 19th-century romanticism for inspiration. Important representative works include Symphony No. 3 "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs" (1976) by Górecki, Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten (1977) by Pärt, and The Veil of the Temple (2002) by Tavener, "Silent Songs" (1977) by Valentin Silvestrov.

New Complexity

New Complexity is a current within today's European contemporary avant-garde music scene, named in reaction to the New Simplicity. Amongst the candidates suggested for having coined the term are the composer Nigel Osborne, the Belgian musicologist Harry Halbreich, and the British/Australian musicologist Richard Toop, who gave currency to the concept of a movement with his article "Four Facets of the New Complexity".[19]

Though often atonal, highly abstract, and dissonant in sound, the "New Complexity" is most readily characterized by the use of techniques which require complex musical notation. This includes extended techniques, microtonality, odd tunings, highly disjunct melodic contour, innovative timbres, complex polyrhythms, unconventional instrumentations, abrupt changes in loudness and intensity, and so on. The diverse group of composers writing in this style includes Richard Barrett, Brian Ferneyhough, Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, James Dillon, Michael Finnissy, James Erber, and Roger Redgate.

Though not a New Complexity composer himself, the Progressivist (or Neological) composer Neil March studied with Roger Redgate and his concept of "Polyfluidity" owes much to the influence of New Complexity.[citation needed]

Minimalism and post-minimalism

The minimalist generation still has a prominent role in new composition. Philip Glass has been expanding his symphony cycle, while John Adams's On the Transmigration of Souls, a choral work commemorating the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks, won a Pulitzer Prize. Steve Reich has explored electronic opera (most notably in Three Tales) and Terry Riley has been active in composing instrumental music and music theatre.

Many composers are expanding the resources of minimalist music to include rock and world instrumentation and rhythms, serialism, and many other techniques. Another notable characteristic is storytelling and emotional expression taking precedence over technique. Post-minimalism is also a movement in painting and sculpture that began in the late 1960s.[20] (See lumpers/splitters)

Extended techniques

Composers often obtain unusual sounds or instrumental timbres through the use of non-traditional (or unconventional) instrumental techniques. Examples of extended techniques include bowing under the bridge of a string instrument or with two different bows, using key clicks on a wind instrument, blowing and overblowing into a wind instrument without a mouthpiece, or inserting object on top of the strings of a piano. Composers’ use of extended techniques is not specific to contemporary music (for instance, Berlioz’s use of col legno in his Symphonie Fantastique is an extended technique) and it transcends compositional schools and styles.

Exponents of extended techniques in the 20th century include Henry Cowell (use of fists and arms on the keyboard, playing inside the piano), John Cage (prepared piano), and George Crumb. The Kronos Quartet, which has been among the most active ensembles in promoting contemporary American works for string quartet, takes delight in music which stretches the manner in which sound can be drawn out of instruments.

European composers who make heavy use of extended techniques include Luigi Nono, Luciano Berio, Helmut Lachenmann, Salvatore Sciarrino, Heinz Holliger, Carlo Forlivesi and Georgia Spiropoulos.

3.Electronic music For centuries, instrumental music had either been created by singing, drawing a bow across or plucking taught gut or metal strings (string instruments), constricting vibrating air (woodwinds and brass) or hitting or stroking something (percussion). In the early twentieth century, devices were invented that were capable of generating sound electronically, without an initial mechanical source of vibration. The theremin, which operated by interrupting a magnetic field around the instrument, did not even have to be touched to produce a tone.[citation needed] Some fifty years after its invention, it found use both as an instrument for scoring in film soundtracks (Forbidden Planet), and in popular music, such as The Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations".

As early as the 1930s, composers such as Olivier Messiaen incorporated electronic instruments into live performance. Recording technology was used to produce art music, as well. The musique concrète of the late 1940s and 1950s was produced by editing together natural and industrial sounds.

In the years following World War II, some composers were quick to adopt developing electronic technology. Electronic music was embraced by composers such as Edgard Varèse, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Milton Babbitt, Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono, Herbert Brün, and Iannis Xenakis as a way to exceed the limits of traditional instruments.

As more electronic technology matured, so did the music. Late in the century, the personal computer began to be used to create art music. In one common technique, a microphone is used to record live music, and a program processes the music in real time and generates another layer of sound. Pieces have also been written algorithmically based on the analysis of large data sets.

In the 1950s the film industry also began to make extensive use of electronic soundtracks. From the late 1960s onward, much popular music was developed on synthesizers by pioneering groups like Heaven 17, The Human League, Art of Noise, and New Order.

4.Folk music

Folk music, in the original sense of the term as coined in the 18th century by Johann Gottfried Herder, is music produced by communal composition and possessing dignity, though by the late 19th century the concept of ‘folk’ had become a synonym for ‘nation’, usually identified as peasants and rural artisans, as in the Merrie England movement and the Irish and Scottish Gaelic Revivals of the 1880s. Folk music arose, and best survives, in societies not yet affected by mass communication and the commercialization of culture.[citation needed] It normally was shared and performed by the entire community (not by a special

class of expert or professional performers, possibly excluding the idea of amateurs), and was transmitted by word of mouth (oral tradition).

During the second half of the 20th century, the term folk music took on a third meaning: it describes a particular kind of popular music which is culturally descended from or otherwise influenced by traditional folk music, such as with, The Kingston Trio, Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, The Byrds, Neil Young, Peter, Paul and Mary, The Mamas & the Papas, The Brothers Four and other singers. This music, in relation to popular music, is marked by a greater musical simplicity, acknowledgment of tradition, frequent socially conscious lyrics, and is similar to country, bluegrass, and other genres in style.

In addition, folk was also borrowed by composers in other genres. Some of the work of Aaron Copland clearly draws on American folk music. In addition, Paul Simon has drawn from both the folk music of Peru and South Africa, and was clearly instrumental in increasing the popularity of groups such as Ladysmith Black Mambazo,[citation needed] although The Tokens' The Lion Sleeps Tonight is the first example of such a crossover. The Indian sitar clearly influenced George Harrison and others.

However, many native musical forms have also found themselves overwhelmed by the variety of new music. Western classical music from prior to the 20th century is more popular now than it ever has been even as modern classical forms struggle to find an audience.[citation needed] Rock and Roll has also had an effect on native musical forms, although many countries such as Germany, Japan and Canada all have their own thriving native rock and roll scenes that have often found an audience outside their home market.

5.Popular music

Popular music, sometimes abbreviated pop music (although the term "pop" is used in some contexts as a more specific musical genre), is music belonging to any of a number of musical styles that are broadly popular or intended for mass consumption and wide commercial distribution—in other words, music that forms part of popular culture.

Popular music dates at least as far back as the mid-19th century. In the United States, much of it evolved from folk music and black culture. It includes Broadway tunes, ballads and singers such as Frank Sinatra.

The relationship (particularly, the relative value) of classical music and popular music is a controversial question. Richard Middleton writes:

Neat divisions between "folk" and "popular", and "popular" and "art", are impossible to find... arbitrary criteria [are used] to define the complement of

"popular". "Art" music, for example, is generally regarded as by nature complex, difficult, demanding; "popular" music then has to be defined as "simple", "accessible", "facile". But many pieces commonly thought of as "art" (Handel's Hallelujah Chorus, many Schubert songs, many Verdi arias) have qualities of simplicity; conversely, it is by no means obvious that the Sex Pistols' records were "accessible", Frank Zappa's work "simple", or Billie Holiday's "facile"

Moreover, composers such as Scott Joplin, George Gershwin and Andrew Lloyd Webber tried to cater to both popular and high brow tastes. Likewise, electronic instruments and styles were incorporated into some classical pieces.

6.Blues Blues is a vocal and instrumental musical form which evolved from African American spirituals, shouts, work songs and chants and has its earliest stylistic roots in West Africa. Blues has been a major influence on later American and Western popular music, finding expression in ragtime, jazz, big bands, rhythm and blues, rock and roll and country music, as well as conventional pop songs and even modern classical music..

7.Counttry musicCountry music, once known as Country and Western music, is a popular musical form developed in the southern United States, with roots in traditional folk music, spirituals, and the blues.

Vernon Dalhart was the first country singer to have a nation-wide hit (May 1924, with "The Wreck Of Old '97")

8.Jazz Trumpeter, bandleader and singer Louis Armstrong, known internationally as the "Ambassador of Jazz," was a much-imitated innovator of early jazz.

Jazz is a musical art form characterized by blue notes, syncopation, swing, call and response, polyrhythms, and improvisation. It has been called[weasel words] the first original art form to develop in the United States of America and partakes of both popular and classical musics.

It has roots in West African cultural and musical expression, in African American music traditions, including blues and ragtime, and European military band music. After originating in African-American communities around the beginning of the 20th century, jazz gained international popularity by the 1920s.

Jazz has also evolved into many sometimes contrasting subgenres including jazz and free jazz.

9.Rock and roll

Elvis Presley in 1957's Jailhouse Rock

Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Fats Domino, Ray Charles, The Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley were notable performers in the 1950s. The Beatles were part of the "British invasion" of the USA in the 1960s.

10.Progressive rock

Progressive rock was a movement to incorporate the more complex structures and instrumentation of jazz and classical music into the limitations of Rock and Roll. Mainly a European movement, it started in the UK in the 1960s with bands like King Crimson, Yes and Genesis and reached its peak popularity during the early 1970s, when albums like Pink Floyd's "The Dark Side of the Moon" and Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells" dominated the charts. Progressive metal (a fusion of heavy metal and progressive rock) later became popular with bands such as Dream Theater.

Major characteristics were long compositions, complex lyrics, a wide range of instruments, unusual time signatures, and the inclusion of long solo passages for different instruments.

11.Punk rock

Punk rock was originally a style of hard rock played at fast speeds with simple lyrics and simple chord arrangements, which originated in the mid 1970s, with acts like Iggy Pop and the Stooges, the Ramones, Patti Smith and the Sex Pistols. The main instruments used were electric guitar, electric bass, and drums.

By the 1980s, the genre had evolved into hardcore (even faster songs with shouted lyrics), New Wave (more pop influenced & used electronic keyboards) and post punk (a more experimental form of punk rock); these genres further evolved into psychobilly (a fusion of punk rock and rockabilly), ska punk (a fusion with ska), grunge (a mix of punk rock and Heavy Metal), pop punk (a development of punk rock with cleaner sounds), gothic rock (darker sounding with introverted lyrics) & many more genres. Punk Rock had a resounding effect on many genres of rock music.

Some subgenres brought about through either natural evolution or the convergence of metal with other genres include, but are not limited to Thrash metal, Power metal, Death metal, Symphonic metal, Nu metal, Black metal, Doom metal and Metalcore.

12.Alternative rock

Originally coined as a catch all term for the various underground styles of rock music in the 1980s, independent of the mainstream pop music industry, alternative rock drew influence primarily from Punk rock, Post-punk and New Wave; though many of its subgenres drew from influences as wide as Psychedelic rock and Jazz. The Velvet Underground were a pivotal group in the creation of the Alternative rock genre. Other genres would go on to be influenced by Alternative rock, such as Art Rock, Noise rock and J-Pop

13.Soul

Soul music is fundamentally rhythm and blues, which grew out of the African-American gospel and blues traditions during the late 1950s and early 1960s in the United States. Over time, much of the broad range of R&B extensions in African-American popular music, generally, also has come to be considered[weasel words] soul music. Traditional soul music usually features individual singers backed by a traditional band consisting of rhythm section and horns, as exemplified by Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding.

14.Funk

Funk is a distinct style of music originated by African-Americans, e.g., James Brown and his band members (especially Maceo and Melvin Parker), George Clinton, and groups like The Meters, Sly & the Family Stone and Tower Of Power. Funk best can be recognized by its syncopated rhythms; thick bass line (often based on an "on the one" beat); razor-sharp rhythm guitars; chanted or hollered vocals (as that of Cameo or the Bar-Kays); strong, rhythm-oriented horn sections; prominent percussion; an upbeat attitude; African tones; danceability; and strong jazzy influences (e.g., as in the music of Herbie Hancock, George Duke, Eddie Harris, and others).

15.Salsa

Salsa music is a diverse and predominantly Caribbean rhythm that is popular in many Latin countries. The word is the same as the salsa meaning sauce. However, the term has been used by Cuban immigrants in New York analogously to swing.

16.Disco

Disco is an up-tempo style of dance music that originated in the early 1970s, mainly from funk, salsa, and soul music, popular originally with gay and black

audiences in large U.S. cities, and derives its name from the French word discothèque (meaning nightclub).11.Hip-Hop

Subgenres/periods of history in Hip Hop include: Old school hip hop, New school hip hop, the so called "Gangsta rap", Underground hip hop, Alternative hip hop and Crunk/Snap music. See Hip Hop culture.

12.World music

To begin with, all the various musics listed in the 1980s under the broad category of world music were folk forms from all around the world, grouped together in order to make a greater impact in the commercial music market. Since then, however, world music has both influenced and been influenced by many different genres like hip hop, pop, and jazz. The term is usually used for all music made in a traditional way and outside of the Anglo-Saxon world, thus encompassing music from Africa, Latin America, and parts of Europe, and music by non-native English speakers in Anglo-Saxon countries, like Native Americans or Indigenous Australians.

World-music radio programs these days will often be playing African or reggae artists, crossover Bhangra, Cretan Music and Latin American jazz groups, etc.

13.New Age music

Electronic and world music, together with progressive rock and religious music are the elements from which new age music has developed. Works within this genre tend to be predominantly peaceful in overall style but with an emphasis on energy and gentle vibrancy. Pieces are composed to aid meditation, to energise yoga, tai chi and exercise sessions or to encourage connections to the planet Earth (in the sense of a spiritual concept of Mother Earth or, perhaps Gaia). There are also new-age compositions which sit equally comfortably in the world music category.

Enthusiasts of new-age music generally share a set of core common understandings including a belief in the spirit and in the ability to change the world for the better in peaceful ways.

Popular new-age artists of the 20th century include Suzanne Ciani, Enya, Yanni, Kitaro, George Winston (solo piano), and many more. Labels include Private Music, Windham Hill, Narada, Higher Octave among others. Private Music and Windham Hill later merged into the BMG group and reorganized under RCA/Victor, while Narada joined with Higher Octave and EMI.