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20th century classical music begins with the late Romantic style of Sergei Rachmaninoff, Impressionism of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, American Vernacular music of Charles Ives and George Gershwin, and continues through the Neoclassicism of middle-period Igor Stravinsky, the twelve-tone music of Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern. It ranges to such distant sound-worlds as the total serialism of Pierre Boulez, the simple harmonies and rhythms of minimalist composers such as Steve Reich, and Philip Glass, the musique concrète of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, the microtonal music written by Easley Blackwood, Alois Hába, Ben Johnston, Harry Partch, and others, the aleatoric music of John Cage, the Intuitive music of Karlheinz Stockhausen, and the polystylism of Alfred Schnittke.

Perhaps the most salient feature during this time period of classical music was the increased use of dissonance. Because of this, the 20th century is sometimes called the "Dissonant Period" of classical music, which followed the common practice period, which emphasized consonance. The watershed transitional moment was the international Paris Exposition celebrating the centennial of the French Revolution. This exposition brought a variety of non-Western performing artists to Paris, influencing Debussy and Mahler in particular. While some writers hold that Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi- d'un faune and Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht are dramatic departures from Romanticism and have strong modernist traits (Schwartz and Godfrey 1993, 9–43), others hold that the Schoenberg work is squarely within the late-Romantic tradition of Wagner and Brahms (Neighbour 2001, 582).

Among the most prominent composers of the 20th century were Béla Bartók, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Giacomo Puccini, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Charles Ives, Edward Elgar, Frederick Delius, Arnold Schoenberg, Jean Sibelius, Elliott Carter, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Sergei Prokofiev, Gabriel Fauré, Alberto Ginastera, Gian-Carlo Menotti, Igor Stravinsky, Dmitri Shostakovich, Alban Berg, Manuel de Falla, Peter Maxwell Davies, Ottorino Respighi, John Cage, Benjamin Britten, Anton Webern, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Aaron Copland, Carl Nielsen, Paul Hindemith, György Ligeti, Olivier Messiaen, Kurt Weill, Milton Babbitt, Samuel Barber, Luciano Berio, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Henri Dutilleux and Witold Lutosławski. Classical music also had a significant cross fertilization with jazz, with several composers being able to work in both genres, including George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein.

An important feature of 20th century concert music is the splitting of the audience into traditional and avant-garde, with many figures prominent in one world considered minor or unacceptable in the other. Composers such as Anton Webern, Elliott Carter, Edgard Varèse, Milton Babbitt, and Luciano Berio have devoted followings within the avant-garde, but are often attacked outside of it. As time has passed, however, it is increasingly accepted, though by no means universally so, that the boundaries are more porous than the many polemics would lead one to believe: many of the techniques pioneered by the above composers show up in popular music by The Beatles, Deep Purple, Yes, Genesis, King Crimson, Pink Floyd, ELP, Mike Oldfield, Enigma, Vangelis, Jean Michel Jarre and in film scores that draw mass audiences.

It should be kept in mind that this article presents an overview of 20th century classical music and many of the composers listed under the following trends and movements may not identify exclusively as such and may be considered as participating in different movements. For instance, at different times during his career, Igor Stravinsky may be considered a romantic, modernist, neoclassicist, and a serialist.

The 20th century was also an age where recording and broadcast changed the economics and social relationships inherent in music. An individual in the 19th century made most music themselves, or attended performances. An individual in the industrialized world had access to radio, television, phonograph and later digital music such as the CD.

'==Romantic style==this is very very very very very very boring. Particularly in the early part of the century, many composers wrote music which was an extension of 19th century Romantic music. Harmony, though sometimes complex, was tonal,^{[citation needed]} and traditional instrumental groupings such as the orchestra and string quartet remained the most usual. Traditional forms such as the symphony and concerto remained in use. (See Romantic Music)

Many prominent composers — among them Dmitri Kabalevsky, Dmitri Shostakovich, Maurice Ravel, and Benjamin Britten — made significant advances in style and technique while still employing a melodic, harmonic, rhythmiohwherodfksjfisdlkjfidsfjioasiejf8ioskejfoasiejkfosekjfoweijfieoakasjdifoaksdjfosidjfksjidofjwoeirukldjfiweoirjkejfewoirdkfjeiowjfowierukdfjoeiruedkfjoeiruekjfowieruejfowieurkjfowiuerkjfowierukfcjowiereoirieieieieieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeec, structural, and textural language which was related to that of the 19th century.

Music along these lines was written throughout the 20th century, and continues to be written today. Some other twentieth-century composers of works in a more-or-less-traditional idiom include:

Minimalist composers such as Philip Glass have also be said to evoke some sense of nineteenth-century melodic and harmonic language, but depart radically in structure and texture, harmony, ideas, development, counterpoint and rhythm.

Many other 20th century composers took more experimental routes.

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Main article: Modernism (music)

Modernism is the name given to a trend of thought in music and other art media (See Modernism) arising out of the idea that the late 19th and early 20th centuries presented a new basis for society and activity, and therefore art should adopt this new basis, however construed, as the fundamental of aesthetics.^{[citation needed]} Modernism took the progressive spirit of the late 19th century, its love of rigor and of technical advancement, and unhinged it from the norms and forms of late 19th century art.^{[citation needed]} Various movements in 20th century music, including neo-classicism, serialism, experimentalism, minimalism, and conceptualism can be traced to this idea.^{[citation needed]}

Arnold Schoenberg is one of the most significant figures in 20th century music. His early works are in a late-Romantic style, influenced by Richard Wagner and Gustav Mahler (Neighbour 2001), but he later abandoned a tonal framework altogether, instead writing freely atonal music. In time, he developed the twelve-tone technique of composition, intended to be a replacement for traditional tonal pitch organisation.^{[citation needed]} His pupils Anton Webern and Alban Berg also developed and furthered the use of the twelve-tone system and were notable for their use of the technique in their own right.^{[citation needed]} They together are known, colloquially, as the Schoenberg "trinity"^{[citation needed]} or the Second Viennese School. This name was created to imply that this "New Music" would have the same effect as the "First Viennese School" of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.^{[citation needed]}

Twelve-tone technique itself was later adapted by other composers to control aspects of music other than the pitch of the notes, such as durations, dynamics and modes of attack, creating "total serial music. Milton Babbitt created his time-point system, where the distance in time between attack points for the notes is serialized also,^{[citation needed]} while some composers serialized aspects such as register or dynamics.^{[citation needed]} In Europe, the "punctual", "pointist", or "pointillist" style of Messiaen's "Mode de valeurs et d'intensités", widely viewed at the time as being derived from Webern—in which individual tones' characteristics, or "parameters" are each determined independently—was very influential in the years immediately following 1951 among composers such as Pierre Boulez, Karel Goeyvaerts, Luigi Nono and Karlheinz Stockhausen.^{[citation needed]} Stravinsky, who studied as a young man with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, became a primitivist, then a neoclassicist, and ultimately incorporated serialism into his compositional techniques following Schoenberg's death in 1951.

In the early part of the 20th century modernist composers such as George Antheil and others produced music that was shocking to audiences of the time for its disregard or flaunting of musical conventions.^{[citation needed]} Charles Ives integrated American and European traditions as well as vernacular and church styles, while innovating in rhythm, harmony, and form (Burkholder 2001). Henry Cowell performed his solo piano pieces by strumming or plucking the inside of the piano, knocking on the outside, or depressing tone clusters with his arms or boards.^{[citation needed]} Edgard Varèse wrote highly dissonant pieces that utilized unusual sonorities and futuristic, scientific sounding names; he also dreamed of producing music electronically.^{[citation needed]} Charles Seeger enunciated the concept of dissonant counterpoint, a technique used by Carl Ruggles, Ruth Crawford-Seeger, and others.^{[citation needed]} Igor Stravinsky and Serge Diaghilev fled the riot that greeted The Rite of Spring and Vaslav Nijinsky's choreography.^{[citation needed]} Darius Milhaud and Paul Hindemith explored bitonality.^{[citation needed]} Amadeo Roldán brought music written specifically for percussion ensemble into the classical tradition^{[citation needed]}; he was soon followed by Varèse and then others.^{[citation needed]} Kurt Weill wrote the popular Threepenny Opera entirely in the popular idiom of German cabarets.^{[citation needed]} Modernist composers being the avant-garde, they often wrote atonally, sometimes explored twelve tone technique, used liberal amounts of dissonance, quoted or imitated popular music, or somehow provoked their audience.^{[citation needed]}

Main Article: Neoclassicism (music)

Neo-classicism, in music, means the movement in the 20th century to return to a revived "common practice" harmony, mixed with greater dissonance and rhythm, as the basic point of departure for music.^{[citation needed]} Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, Paul Hindemith, Sergei Prokofiev and Béla Bartók are usually listed as the most important composers in this mode, but also the prolific Darius Milhaud and his contemporary Francis Poulenc.^{[citation needed]}

Neo-classicism was born at the same time as the general return to rational models in the arts in response to World War I.^{[citation needed]} Smaller, more spare, more orderly was conceived of as the response to the overwrought emotionalism which many felt had herded people into the trenches.^{[citation needed]} Since economics also favored smaller ensembles, the search for doing "more with less" took on a practical imperative as well. Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat is thought of as a seminal "neo-classical piece", as are his Dumbarton Oaks Concerto and his "Symphonies of Wind Instruments", as well as his Symphony in C.^{[citation needed]} Stravinsky's neo-classicism culminated with his opera Rake's Progress, to a libretto by the well-known modernist poet, W. H. Auden.^{[citation needed]}

Stravinsky's rival for a time in neo-classicism was the German Paul Hindemith, who mixed spiky dissonance, polyphony and free ranging chromaticism into a style which was "useful".^{[citation needed]} He produced both chamber works and orchestral works in this style, perhaps most famously "Mathis der Maler".^{[citation needed]} His chamber output includes his Sonata for French Horn, an expressionistic work filled with dark detail and internal connections.

Neo-classicism found a welcome audience in America.^{[citation needed]} The school of Nadia Boulanger in Paris promulgated ideas about music based on her understanding of Stravinsky's music.^{[citation needed]} Her students include Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Darius Milhaud, Ástor Piazzolla, Ned Rorem, and Virgil Thomson.

Neo-classicism's most audible traits are melodies which use the tritone as a stable interval, and coloristically add dissonant notes to ostinato and block harmonies, along with the free mixture of polyrhythms.^{[citation needed]} Neo-classicism won greater audience acceptance more quickly, and was taken to heart by those opposed to atonality as the true "modern" music.^{[citation needed]} Neo-classicism also embraced the use of folk musics to give greater rhythmic and harmonic variety.^{[citation needed]} Modernists such as the Hungarians Béla Bartók and Romantically inclined Zoltán Kodály and the Czech Leoš Janáček collected and studied their native folk musics which then influenced their compositions.^{[citation needed]}

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Post-modernism can be said to be a response to modernism, but it can also be viewed as a response to a deep-seated shift in societal attitude. According to this view, postmodernism began when historic (as opposed to personal) optimism turned to pessimism, at the latest by 1930 (Meyer 1994, 331).

John Cage is a prominent figure in 20th century music whose influence steadily grew during his lifetime. Interestingly, the seeming opposite of Cage's indeterminism is the completely determined music of the serialists, which both schools have noted produce similar sounding textures, perhaps because many serialists, such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen have used aleatoric processes. Michael Nyman argues that minimalism was a reaction to and made possible by both serialism and indeterminism (Nyman 1999, 139). (See also experimental music)

Main article: Minimalist music

Many composers in the later 20th century began to explore what is now called minimalism. The most specific definition of minimalism refers to the dominance of process in music — where fragments are layered on top of each other, often looped, to produce the entirety of the sonic canvas. Early examples include Terry Riley's In C and Steve Reich's Drumming. Riley is seen by some as the "father" of minimalist music with In C, a work comprised of melodic cells that each performer in an ensemble plays through at their own rate. The minimalist wave of composers—Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and La Monte Young to name the most prominent—wanted music to be "accessible" to ordinary listeners, and wanted to express concrete specific questions of dramatic and music form, not hidden in layers of technique, but very overtly.^{[citation needed]} One key difference between minimalism and previous music is the use of different cells being "out of phase" or determined by the performers; contrast this with the opening of Das Rheingold by Richard Wagner which, despite its use of triadic cells, has each part controlled by the same impulse and moving at the same speed.

Minimalist music is often contentious amongst traditional listeners.^{[citation needed]} Its critics find it to be overly repetitive and empty while proponents argue that the static elements that are often prevalent draw more interest to small changes.^{[citation needed]} Minimalism has, however, inspired and influenced many composers not usually labeled "minimalist" such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and György Ligeti.^{[citation needed]} Composers such as Arvo Pärt, John Tavener, and Henryk Górecki, whose Symphony No. 3 was the highest selling classical album of the 1990s,^{[citation needed]} have found great success with what has been called "Holy Minimalism" in their deeply felt religious works.^{[citation needed]}

The next wave of composers working in this tradition are not called "Minimalist" by some, but are by others.^{[citation needed]} These include opera composer John Adams and his student Aaron Jay Kernis. The expansion of minimalism from process music, to music which relies on texture to hold together the movement of the music has created a wider diversity of compositions and composers.^{[citation needed]}

The influences of minimalists such as Steve Reich (in particular Drumming) are clear in much of the work of DJ Spooky showing a perfect example of the crossover between 20th century classical, and electronic music such as trip-hop and even trance and drum n bass.^{[citation needed]}

Main article: Electronic art music

Technological advances in the 20th century enabled composers to use electronic means of producing sound. The first electronic instrument was invented in Russia in 1919 by Leon Theremin, and was called the theremin. Some composers simply incorporated electronic instruments into relatively conventional pieces. Olivier Messiaen, for example, used the ondes martenot in a number of works (though none of them could really be called "conventional").

Other composers abandoned conventional instruments and used magnetic tape to create music, recording sounds and then manipulating them in some way. Pierre Schaeffer was the pioneer of such music, termed Musique concrète (acousmatic art). Some figures, such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, used purely electronic means to create their work. In the United States of America, Milton Babbitt used the RCA Mark II Synthesizer to create music. Sometimes such electronic music was combined with more conventional instruments, Stockhausen's Hymnen, Edgard Varèse's Déserts, and Mario Davidovsky's Synchronisms offer three examples.

Oskar Sala, created the non-musical soundtrack for Alfred Hitchcock's film The Birds, using the trautonium electronic instrument he helped develop.

Some well-known electronic works generally regarded as in the classical tradition include "Film Music" by Vladimir Ussachevsky, A Rainbow in Curved Air and Shri Camel by Terry Riley, "Silver Apples of the Moon", "The Wild Bull", and "Return" by Morton Subotnick, Sonic Seasonings and Switched-On Bach by Wendy Carlos, "Light Over Water" by John Adams, Aqua by Edgar Froese, and Poème électronique by Edgar Varèse.^{[citation needed]}

Iannis Xenakis is another modern composer who used computers and electronic instruments, including one he invented (called the UPIC), in many compositions.

A number of institutions specialising in electronic music sprang up in the 20th century, with IRCAM in Paris perhaps the best known.

A number of composers combined elements of the jazz idiom with classical compositional styles. Notable examples include:

"New Complexity" is a current within today's European contemporary avant-garde music scene. Some composers identified with this term are Brian Ferneyhough, James Dillon and Michael Finnissy. Another prominent development is the extension of instrumental technique and timbre, for instance in the music of Luigi Nono, Helmut Lachenmann and Salvatore Sciarrino. Another notable movement is spectral music. Prominent spectral composers include Tristan Murail and Gérard Grisey, and the 'post-spectral' composers Kaija Saariaho and Magnus Lindberg.

• List of 20th century classical composers
• Contemporary music
• Acousmatic art
• Electronic art music

• Burkholder, J. Peter. 2001. "Ives, Charles (Edward)." The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. S. Sadie and J. Tyrrell. London: Macmillan.
• Meyer, Leonard B. 1994. Music, the Arts, and Ideas. 2d ed., with a new postlude. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226521435
• Neighbour, O. W. 2001. "Schoenberg, Arnold". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. S. Sadie and J. Tyrrell, xxii, 577–604. London: Macmillan.
• Nyman, Michael. 1999. Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. Music in the Twentieth Century. Second edition. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521653835
• Schwartz, Elliott, and Daniel Godfrey. 1993. Music Since 1945: Issues, Materials and Literature. New York: Schirmer Books; Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan Canada; New York: Maxwell Macmillan International. ISBN 0028730402

• The Avant Garde Project, free downloads of out of print avant garde music
• Ircam Paris
• MICROCOSMS: A Simplified Approach to Musical Styles of the Twentieth Century by Phillip Magnuson
• Dolmetsch.com: music history online: music of the 20th century by Dr. Brian Blood
• Art of the States
• Recordings of classes on 20th Century Music given by a Dallapiccola pupil
• Música y filosofía contemporánea; Registros polifónicos de John Cage a Peter Sloterdijk | Dr. Adolfo Vasquez Rocca

• G. Schirmer, Inc.
• Boosey&Hawkes Music Publishers
• Schott Music International
• 4´33" Vierdreiunddreißig München Musikverlag
• Atopos Foundation for Contemporary Classical Music
• Orchestronics

• Teachout, Terry. Masterpieces of the Century: A Finale - 20th century classical music, Commentary Magazine, Volume: 107 Issue: 6 Page: 55
• Lee, Douglas. Masterworks of 20th-Century Music: The Modern Repertory of the Symphony Orchestra, Routledge; 1 edition. ISBN 0415938473, ISBN 978-0415938471
• Roberts, Paul. Claude Debussy - 20th Century Composers, Phaidon Press. ISBN 0714835129, ISBN 978-0714835129