As the 150 years known as the Common Practice Period came to an end, a new kind of Western music began to emerge in the dawn of the twentieth century. The Common Practice Period had represented the golden age of classical... [more]

As the 150 years known as the Common Practice Period came to an end, a new kind of Western music began to emerge in the dawn of the twentieth century. The Common Practice Period had represented the golden age of classical music in many ways. Almost all its music compositions adhered to a traditional tonal system; they centered around one pitch class, utilized only major and minor scales, and featured harmonies built with stacks of thirds. While this system undoubtedly produced some of the best music of the ages, by the 1900s composers were ready to look for other ways to tones and began experimenting with various scales, patterns, and compositional procedures. Among the first of the twentieth-century composers was Claude Debussy, whose style came to be known as Impressionism. It maintained a degree of tonal similarity to the traditional style, but utilized many new composition procedures. One of the most notable was his method of using tall chords in harmonic phrases. Instead of employing a traditional stack of triads, he would continue to stack: a 9th, a 13th, and so on. This trick allowed him to change the tonal center of a piece so smoothly as to make it unnoticeable. Across the continent, the Russian Five composed stormy, often jarring music, which immortalized the folk melodies of their homeland while utilizing unfamiliar scales and chords. The Five made great use of the diminished -- or octatonic -- scale and chord group. They brought the diminished seventh chord, which had not previously been popular, into their composition procedures. Arnold Schoenberg is widely credited with inventing the 12-tone system, although others experimented with it for almost 500 years before he brought it into the musical mainstream. This system did not allow any single pitch to act as the tonal center of a piece, nor did it allow for traditional collections of pitches and chord patterns. Schoenberg's method is exceptional because it completely defied every accepted composition rule of the Common Practice Period. With his new tonal system, Schoenberg essentially created a new kind of music. Many composers were quick to follow Schoenberg's lead, but the man who carried it to the next level was composer Pierre Boulez. He introduced the system known as Serialism, wherein every aspect of music from the dynamics to the percussion patterns were part of a planned series. The final twist thrown into the formerly orderly world of Western art music was the Aleatory system: the element of chance. This element, introduced by John Cage, is basically a rule that governed aspects of musical composition so that no mathematical or theoretical rules could possibly apply -- it was the complete antithesis of the Common Practice system. Of course, not all of these groundbreaking composers necessarily had scientific motives or explanations for the new systems that they implemented -- they were simply trying to find new ways to create music. Their efforts were often at odds, not only with the Common Practice conventions, but with each other. Indeed, the defining feature of twentieth-century music has been chaos. This chaos eventually led to the "Atonal Music" codifying system, which attempts to find a place for each of the wildly inventive new methods within the framework of traditional acoustic and theoretical laws. Thanks to this codifying system, we can follow the progress and theories of the modern composers, locating some sense of order in a seemingly incomprehensible piece of music. Many of the rules governing creative expression have been permanently bent or even broken, leaving a myriad of new possibilities for artists to come. [show less]