In Paris, the capital of art in the 20th century, Dyagilev, a famous Russian artistic performance agent, organizes a group of composers, dramatists and painters every year to present some novel plays for the ballet russes in Paris. Faced with the growing interest of Parisian audiences in Russian-style music, Stravinsky wrote ballet music "Firebird" and "petrushka" successively, which was highly praised. However, when his third dance drama "Sacrifice to Spring" premiered on 19 13, the audience was shocked by the rough and intense music of primitivism and the dance of the actors wearing linen bags on the stage, and there was a scandal of theater riots.
Barto used the piano as a percussion instrument in his piano piece Allegro Violent, which was composed at 19 1 1. The traditional elegant skills of the piano have been replaced by percussion and pounding, and the chords of the second-degree dense group have produced a violent and frightening sound.
Pierrot on the Moon is a solo suite written by Schoenberg in 19 12. People are familiar with Pietro, the love loser and clown in the comedies of the past. He is lonely and morbid, recalling the past in a trance. The abstract lyrics of symbolism are sung in the tone of "chanting", which is closely combined with speaking and singing.
These three works, which appeared in similar times, represented the wave of European rebellion against European traditional music before World War I in the 20th century. They ignored the passion of romanticism, the aesthetic meditation of impressionism, and even the criterion of musical beauty formed over thousands of years was ruthlessly broken. These three works, which seemed unacceptable to the audience at first, have now been regarded as the classics of the 20th century, and they represent some major music trends in the last half century.
Neo-nationalist music
/kloc-nationalist music, which rose in Europe in the 0/9th century, gained new development in the first half of the 20th century. In the 20th century, composers of the Folk Music School no longer only rely on the traditional notation to record folk music, but record the original appearance of folk music more accurately through tape recorders and new technologies of ethnomusicology. Instead of bringing the irregularity in folk music into the track of artistic music, they cherish these unique qualities and seek the original musical spirituality of their own nation. In the 20th century, Chinese Music School absorbed nutrition from rural and urban music culture. They adopted the modern musical techniques of the 20th century, sharp harmonies, percussion-like rhythms and ancient modes.
Hungarian Bela Bartok (1881-1945) is an outstanding representative of neo-nationalist music. He is a national musician, pianist and composer. Through in-depth investigation of Hungarian folk songs, he pointed out that "the pentatonic scale of ancient Hungary is a branch of the pentatonic scale center of Central Asia, Turkey, Mongolia and China." He tried to use the "unknown spirit" in Hungarian music as the basis of his works. Classicism, romanticism and modern music techniques are widely combined, and the representative works include The Castle of Duke Bluebeard, The Magical Man, Orchestral Concerto and Piano Concerto No.3, etc.
For two centuries after purcell, Britain remained unknown in the music industry. From the folk song movement at the end of 19, a number of nationalist composers appeared in the United States in the 20th century. Elgar (1857-1934)' s Mysterious Variations and the oratorio Dream of Theseus are regarded as the symbols of the revival of English music. Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) maintained the authentic English folk song style, and his music language was restrained, simple and harmonious. He wrote nine symphonies. Holst's (1874— 1934) large-scale band suite Planets is influenced by Stravinsky, which is full of oriental mystery. Benjamin Britt-Teng (19 13- 1976) absorbed more European characteristics and formed an eclectic music style. The music of the famous opera Peter Grims is lyrical and simple.
America, which lacks the tradition of professional music, has matured by learning and imitating German music. Charles ives (1874— 1954) used his spare time to do experiments behind closed doors. He vividly displayed the image of American life with traditional American tones, polyrhythm, polyphony and complicated textures. For example, Three Places in New England and the Fourth Symphony. But when people found his music, he was already a dying old man. The second generation composers who rose in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s showed the true maturity of American music, such as Copland, Harris, Pienton, sessions, Thomson and Steele. Gershwin was different. He successfully introduced jazz, blues and black spirit into artistic music. He wrote the orchestral rhapsody in blue, An American in Paris and the opera The Monster and Beth. A new generation of composers appeared in the middle of this century: william schuman, Carter, Barber, Cage and Babbitt.
neoclassicism
Neoclassicism is a popular musical trend of thought in European music circles after the First World War. The social and political upheaval brought by the war and the trauma of the soul have caused the return of art to tradition. This is a "new baroque movement" of "returning to Bach". Neoclassical composers imitated the styles of some composers in the18th century, such as Handel, Cooperland, scarlatti and Vivaldi. They denied19th century in a way different from that before the war. They tried their best to reject the strong subjectivity in romantic music and took the objective and transcendental factors in baroque music as their artistic criterion. In the18th century, they paid attention to the application of polyphony techniques and music genre forms, and adopted modern composition techniques while imitating the past music styles. They strive to get rid of the marriage of literature, painting and music, advocate pure music, and believe that the purpose of music is to establish their own order.
Igor stravinsky (1882— 197 1) is an important advocate of neoclassicism. The author's new postwar work is the ballet Puccinella. The quiet and simple style of this work is in sharp contrast with the brutality of Sacrifice to Spring, and the sharp change of this style once again surprised the audience in Paris. During his 30-year neoclassical music style, music pursued objectivity, indifference and rationality. He believes that the more he controls and restricts art, the more he studies it, the more free art will be. However, when he composed early opera music, he still maintained his own personality, such as the creativity of rhythm and the exploration of instrumental music combination by polyphony and harmony. His main works are: poetry symphony, violin concerto in D major, ballet Apollo, opera-oratorio Oedipus, symphony in C major and opera The Life of the Prodigal Son.
German composer Paul Hindemith (1895-1963) used almost all the traditional genres to create, and created important works for almost all the commonly used musical instruments. He studied Bach's polyphonic music tradition from the Renaissance reform, preferring counterpoint texture and well-controlled disharmony, and the lyricism of music was implicit but not exposed.
Eric Satie (1866— 1925) was a contemporary of Debussy. He believes that French music should be simple, natural, clear and ordinary, and his views have influenced a generation of French composers. 1920, French journalist Collet wrote an article entitled "Russia Five, France Six, Sati", in which he commented on the concerts of six young composers. They are Nigel, Mi Yue, Planck, Auric, Dooley and Teffer. As a creative group, the six-person group has not been active for a long time. They are all influenced by Sadie and neoclassicism to varying degrees, but their musical styles are quite different. Their representative works include Miyo's Brazil Suite, Oneig's Pacific No.231and the oratorio Joan of Arc on the Burning Pile.
expressionism
Expressionism first appeared in the field of painting and poetry, and expanded to the field of music before the First World War ... The main representatives of expressionist music are Schoenberg (1874- 195 1), Berger (1885- 1935) and Wei Boen.
Expressionism, German-Austrian romantic music in the late 20th century. Expressionism, like romantic music, strives to express subjective inner feelings, preferring tension and strangeness. Different from romanticism, expressionist creation often stems from a strong impulse in the deep heart, exaggerating and deforming the real feelings through the subconscious. People in modern society are often in inner conflict, tension, anxiety and fear.
Schoenberg's music began with late romanticism and gradually gave up tonality. However, if you leave the key center and key, you will lose the traditional music organization form. By writing short songs, he relies on literature and drama other than music to form the form of musical works. After a transitional exploration, he finally found a new way to organize music instead of tonality-12 tone composition method. There is only a correlation between these12 tones, and there is no central tone-tonic tone. In each work, the composer arranges the 12 tones on the chromatic scale in a certain order, which is called the "preface" or "preface" of the work. Each tone in this sequence can appear successively to form melody, or simultaneously to form harmony or counterpoint. Phonetic order can form a reflection in turn, retrograde from back to front, or retrograde from back to front. Any one of these sounds must not be repeated before the other eleven sounds appear, so as to ensure that the 12 sound is equally important and does not highlight any one sound. Rhythm timbre and intensity can appear in any form. There are various changes in twelve-tone technique's concrete practice, but in a sense, the music written in this way can be called infinite variation of the basic phonology of songs. This method of music organization without tonality had a wide influence in the West after the Second World War. Schoenberg's 12-tone masterpieces include: his first piano suite, his only work Variations for a Band, and Survivor of Warsaw written for a complete band in this way (for speaking English, chorus and band). Berg's famous opera Wozek combines classical form and dominant motivation with atonal music and twelve-tone music. Reading and singing alternate with traditional singing, and tonal columns often appear. This expressionist opera has strong social criticism. Weber applied Schoenberg's twelve-tone rule more thoroughly and rationally, thus making his music language more abstract and experimental.
Early experimental music
In the first half of the 20th century, western music has shown an experimental tendency, and the composer's experiments have not only stayed in the music system. They tried to shake or transcend the traditional music system to create.
Czech composer alois Bach (1893-1973) used a lot of differential music in his creation, that is, the smallest unit of interval is not semitone, but 1/4 or 1/6 which is smaller than semitone. His opera "Mother" with national style is written in 1/4 phonology. The American composer harry patch (190 1- 1974) divided an octave into 43 levels. He made many musical instruments by himself, which were specially used to play his music. Differential music has little influence because it is limited by the structure of traditional musical instruments and exceeds the ability of ordinary people to distinguish sounds, but many composers have been experimenting in this field since then.
Futurism, which arose in Italy at the beginning of the century, emphasized the expression of modern mechanical civilization by art, which influenced the appearance of short-lived noise music in the music field. Italian Rusolo (1885- 1947) claimed that "the narrow circle of pure music must be broken", and the noise that can be heard in daily life was regarded as the basic acoustic material of music works.
The French-American composer Varese (1883- 1965) was also influenced by futurism, and thought that in the new scientific era, music should be "liberated from the bondage of scales and instruments with equal rhythm." His works such as high prism, integration, ionization and density 2 1.5 are all related to natural science. Different from noise music, Varese's new acoustics experiment is mainly in the field of percussion music. About 40 percussion instruments and two alarms were used in the ionization process. It has no melody, no harmony, and consists of different timbres and sound structures: metal, wood, heavy and light ... In the 1950s, with the help of new electronic equipment, electronic music such as Desert and Electronic Music Poetry was created. Varese reduced the role of pitch change in music and put timbre and acoustics first, which had an important influence on post-war music style.
Avantgarde and experimental music
After 1945, among the more complicated music schools in the west, sequential music was first widely concerned by the music industry. The twelve-tone works of the New Vienna School, which were forbidden to play during World War II, attracted the favor of a group of young composers, especially after the war. From 65438 to 0946, they gathered in the "New Music Holiday Training Course" in darmstadt to study and study Wei Boen's music. It opened the curtain of the development of post-war sequential music. The order of twelve-tone music is only expressed in pitch. The sequence music that appeared in 1950s not only used the sequence technique in pitch, but also used the sequence technique in rhythm, dynamics and timbre, so it was also called "whole sequence music". Variations on 12 tone works for orchestral music by Wei Boen extended the principle of sequence to rhythm, which laid the foundation for the development of sequence music. Mei Xian's piano piece Time and Dynamics Mode is considered to be the first direct and complete serial work. The important representatives of post-war sequence music are Pierre Pulitzer (1925-), Stockhausen (1928-), Babbitt (1916-) and Luigi Nono (1999). Stravinsky, the representative of neoclassicism, also turned to sequential music in the 1950s. Because of its orderly mathematical experiments, full-sequence music weakened its artistic sensibility and restricted the creativity of composers too much, and it declined after the 1970s. Few composers used strict full-sequence techniques to compose music.
At the other extreme, which is completely opposite to sequential music with orderly tone, is occasional music. Emphasize the decisive role of irrational intuition, contingency and impulse in music works. When composing accidental music, the composer can decide the music material by rolling the dice, or he can choose the sound to compose music by accident. Although they arranged the chapters of the music, they allowed the players to freely choose the playing order when playing. Therefore, performance becomes an "accident" of music, and every performance of music will have a different look. John Cage (19 12-), an American composer, is a representative of accidental music. He designed sixty-four musical modes (including pitch, duration and timbre) according to the sixty-four hexagrams in China's Book of Changes, and then found out the corresponding six lines and their corresponding musical modes by throwing three coins. Cage gave up the composer and performer's control of the piano music "4 minutes and 33 seconds", which has reached the extreme level. The only sound in this work is actually the sound of the surrounding environment when playing. Other people who have written temporary music include Feldman, Brown and Stockhausen.
The appearance of electronic music is an important progress of western music after World War II. The invention of magnetic tape recording not only provides a convenient tool for audio storage and editing, but also makes electronic music possible. In the late 1940s, a group of early electronic music experimenters in Paris used various skills of splicing and playing tapes to create their works "concretely" on tapes instead of "abstractly" writing them on paper. They call this kind of music concrete music. 195 1 year, radio cologne, west Germany set up an electronic music laboratory. They use the sound generated by the oscillator as the audio material of electronic music made by tape recording. Eimert and Stockhausen both wrote here. After the advent of the level control synthesizer in the 1960s, it greatly simplified the creation process of electronic music (the process of creating electronic music by tape is complicated and takes a long time), expanded the scope of sound performance, and can also improvise on the spot. The synthesizer masterpiece of American composer Morton Subotnik (1933-) is Silver Apples on the Moon. The appearance of computer sound synthesis provides a broader road for the display of electronic music.
In the first half of the 20th century, in many western music works, rhythm, with its traditional background position, suddenly emerged as an important factor in music expression and creation. After 1945, the exploration of timbre in western music became the general trend. Mei Xian (1908-), a French composer, whose creative career spans the middle of the century, is a figure connecting the past with the future. Before World War II, he absorbed nutrition from oriental music, and developed the rhythm method of the 20th century after Sacrificing Spring. After World War II, he turned to the study of timbre, and many of his works were based on his recorded birdsong, expressing the original colors with rhythm and timbre. Pandeli Penderecki (1933-), a postwar Polish composer, became a household name by using new timbre and harmony block techniques. Hungarian composer Ligethey (1923-) wants to create a kind of so-called "non-musical" music with "state" instead of "event". Numerous individual musical instruments are intertwined, forming a dense texture sound. Other composers who explored this new timbre included Sinatra in Greece, Nuo Nuo in Italy, Beriau and Clem in the United States.
In the late 1960s, under the influence of painting and sculpture, Covenant music appeared in America. Contrary to highly ordered and complicated sequential music, Jian Yuepai pursues the extreme simplicity of music, and they deliberately limit the rhythm, melody, harmony and orchestration to a very small range. Under the influence of Indian and Indonesian music, they pay attention to subtle changes in melody and rhythm.
The third trend music in the late 1950s was the trend of combining traditional professional art music with folk or pop music. Different from the same trend in history, the third trend retains the improvisational characteristics of folk songs or pop music.
Neo-romanticism appeared in 1970s and 1980s, which marked the revival of romantic music in the19th century after three quarters of a century. Neo-romantic music restores the tonality, function and harmony of music, pays attention to emotional expression, and even often quotes the music materials of19th century romantic composers. At the same time, more abundant musical languages, techniques and styles emerged in the 20th century were adopted in music, forming a combination of romanticism and modernism.