Musical Style: Modern

Twentieth century music 1900 - 2000

2oth century style

• Extremely diverse
• Explorations of modality and the pentatonic scale
• Expressionism
• Minimalism
• Atonality and serialism
• Still a great deal of tonal, neo-romantic music being written - examples being Kabalevsky, Shostakovitch, Elgar

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2oth century structures

Tone poems and descriptive pieces
Expressionist work
Modernist and minimalist
Dissonance and atonality

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2oth century instruments

the prepared piano
Invention of the synthesiser in 1960s
MIDI sequencers used increasingly from 1990s

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2oth century composers

• George Gershwin
• Arnold Schoenberg
• Alban Berg
• Ygor Stravinsky
• Claude Debussy
• Maurice Ravel
• Bela Bartók
• George Gershwin
• John Cage
• Philip Glass