Twentieth Century Music: From Late Romanticism to the Second Viennese School

Twentieth century classical music (anything composed between 1900 to 2000) contains arguably the greatest variety of different musical styles than any of the periods before it combined. It is important to note that many of the bulleted composers are not limited to the type of music in the heading they are listed under – it may be the style for which they are best known, but many composers combined styles, dabbled in other areas, and produced works that are not easily distinctly categorizable by one label only.

Late Romanticism

Romantic composers focused on extending the emotional possibilities of melody and theme. They used a great amount of tonality (keeping the same center pitch and writing in relation to that pitch, so that the music sounds pleasant and tuneful) and modulation (seguing to different keys). Romantic composers also used chromaticism much more frequently, as well as heartbreaking extended dissonances and resolutions. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Romanticism was just winding down. Late Romantic composers sometimes composed pieces very similar to early Romantic ones, but a handful, like Stravinsky (with his ballet Firebird), Schoenberg (with his oratorio Gurrelieder), and Bartok (with his opera Bluebeard’s Castle) blended Romantic qualities into works of entirely different styles.

Important Late Romantic Composers

1. Sergei Rachmaninoff (examples: Ten Preludes for Piano, the symphonic poem Isle of the Dead)
2. Richard Strauss (examples: the operas Salome and The Knight of the Rose)
3. Giacomo Puccini (examples: the opera Madame Butterfly)

Impressionism

Impressionism was less concerned about the technical aspects of music than with its mood and general ambience. Impressionists concentrated on using different textures to evoke a hazy dream state. In order to accomplish this feat, composers used whole tone scales and more dissonance than ever before.

Important Impressionistic Composers

1. Claude Debussy (example: Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun)
2. Maurice Ravel (termed Impressionistic because his work was a reaction to Romanticism, but in actuality most of his compositions don’t qualify – an established historical fluke)

Modernism

Modernism evolved out of the desire composers had to keep up with the changing times, and push the limits of convention and invention alike. The modernism movement included such inventions as atonality, serialism, experimentalism, and free dissonance.

The Second Viennese School

The Second Viennese School was a name given to a group of Viennese composers comprised of Arnold Schoenberg and his students Alban Berg and Anton von Webern. All three were very focused on form as opposed to mood or meaning. Schoenberg was one of the first composers to become interested in atonality (music organized differently than usual – without a tonal center – so as to sound tuneless). He also invented the twelve-tone technique, a method of composing involving twelve notes arranged on a grid. This technique was one example of a growing trend at the time known as serialism, which was a compositional technique that used sets of notes in predetermined orders. The sets could be arranged to allow infinite choice or only a small range of options.

Important Second Viennese School Composers

1. Arnold Schoenberg (example: Pierrot Lunaire)
2. Alban Berg (example: the Piano Sonata, Op. 1, of 1907–8)
3. Anton von Webern (example: the String Trio of 1927)

The Second Viennese School composers were only the beginning of the bizarre, winding paths the Experimentalists, the Neoclassicists, the Minimalists, and the Electronic composers would take next – paths that could belong only to the wild classical music scene of the twentieth century.

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