Music of the 20th and 21st centuries
New languages, 1900–1945
Questions test the -isms, their techniques and representative works.
- Impressionism: Debussy, Ravel; whole-tone and pentatonic scales, colouristic orchestration.
- Primitivism: Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps (1913); shifting meter and ostinato.
- Expressionism and atonality: Schoenberg, Berg, Webern; free atonality then twelve-tone technique (1923).
- Neoclassicism: Stravinsky, Hindemith; older forms, clear textures.
- Bartók: folk research, axis system, arch form; Shostakovich and Prokofiev under Soviet constraints; Ives, Gershwin, Copland in the USA.
After 1945
- Total serialism: Boulez's Structures; parameters serialised beyond pitch.
- Indeterminacy and graphic scores: Cage, 4′33″ (1952).
- Electronic music: musique concrète (Schaeffer, 1948), elektronische Musik (Stockhausen, Cologne).
- Minimalism: Reich, Glass, Riley, Young; repetition and process.
- Spectralism: Grisey, Murail; the sound spectrum as material.
- Neo-romanticism and postmodern collage: Górecki, Tavener, Berio's Sinfonia.
Worked example
A twelve-tone row uses all twelve pitch classes without repetition until the row completes. Its forms are prime, retrograde, inversion and retrograde inversion, each transposable. Serialism is the broader principle; twelve-tone technique applies it to pitch only.
Traps that cost marks
Treating serialism and twelve-tone technique as synonyms; dating 4′33″ to the 1960s; confusing musique concrète (recorded sound) with elektronische Musik (synthesised sound); calling atonal music 'pantonal' without explanation.