Page 229 - (DK) The Classical Music Book - Big Ideas Simply Explained

MODERN 1900–1950 227

Austrian composer Edgard Varèse’s Olivier Messiaen stages Aaron Copland
Anton Webern’s Ionisation premieres the first production of demonstrates American
instrumental work as one of the first Quartet for the End of Time nationalism with
Symphonie further concert hall pieces in the German prisoner Appalachian Spring,
develops Schoenberg’s written solely for a of war camp where he Martha Graham’s ballet
ideas on serialism. percussion ensemble. is being held. about young pioneers.

1928 1933 1941 1944

1930 1937 1941 1945

Commissioned by one-handed Having been denounced British composer Michael Benajamin
pianist Paul Wittgenstein, by Stalin, Dmitri Tippett completes his Britten revives
Maurice Ravel writes Piano Shostakovich writes pacifistic oratorio A Child of British opera with
Concerto in D for the Left Hand, his Fifth Symphony, Our Time, influenced by events Peter Grimes, a
infused with jazz-infuenced which is acclaimed from his life and Jungian stirring drama about
rhythms and harmonies. by the Soviet regime. psychoanalysis. a bullied outcast.

completely atonal, without reference in 1913, he shocked audiences with Benjamin Britten and Michael
to any key. The difficulty of creating his discordant portrayal of Russian Tippett in the next generation.
a cohesive structure led him to folklore in Le Sacre du printemps. Another collector of folk music was
develop a system of composing in The music was both primitive and Béla Bartók, who, like Stravinsky,
which, instead of a having a “home ultra-modern, and a world away did not integrate the songs and
key,” all 12 notes of the chromatic from the Romantic conception of dances of his native Hungary into
scale are given equal importance folk-inspired orchestral music. an existing style but used them
and arranged in a series. This Russian modernism was short- to create a new, modernist style.
12-tone serialism became the lived: after the revolutions of 1917, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and
compositional method of choice the Soviet authorities decried Bartók all spent their final years
not only for Schoenberg but also anything that smacked of elitism. in the US, which had become a
for his students Alban Berg and Stravinsky, like several other center for new music. In the first
Anton Webern (known as the Russian composers, spent the half of the 20th century, it had
“Second Viennese School”). rest of his life abroad. given birth to ragtime and jazz and
Nationalism was far from dead, popular tunes by masters of the
Shock of the new however, as the late works of Jean genre such as George Gershwin.
In addition to these influential Sibelius and Leoš Janá cˇ ek show. It had also seen a very American
French and Viennese composers, It had also taken root in England, tradition of experimentalism
there was a highly significant thanks to composers such as Ralph emerge, starting with Charles Ives,
Russian composer, Igor Stravinsky. Vaughan Williams, who toured the and attracting émigrés such as
Stravinsky made his name writing country collecting folk tunes. The Edgard Varèse, which would come
ballet music in the style of the distinctive nuances of English folk to shape the course of musical
Russian nationalist composers, but music shaped the styles of development into the 21st century. ■

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