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The high value placed on individuality and personal expression in the romantic era has grown even more pronounced in the 20th century. This is partly the result of several features of 20th-century life. In this era more people from more social and geographic backgrounds than ever before have been able to study music and develop their aptitude for composition. An enormous range of tastes and skills has thus become a feature of modern composition. Radios and recordings bring music from once-remote countries in South America and the Far East to the attention of musicians in all parts of the world. The speed of modern communications makes it possible for listeners to evaluate innovations more quickly than ever before. The result of these features is that originality is more highly valued than in any previous era, and that diversity and rapid change have become the most prominent general features of 20th-century music.
Several styles that have played a significant role during the century have names that refer to their harmonic characteristics. Chromaticism has continued to be a prominent feature of harmony in the 20th century. In the first decade of the century, largely as a result of extreme chromaticism, atonality, or the complete absence of tonality, occurred in the music of a few composers. The most notable atonal composer of that time was Arnold Schoenberg, an Austrian.
In the early 1920s Schoenberg devised the twelve-tone method of writing atonal music. In this method, the 12 tones into which the octave is divided are placed in a row following any order of the composer's choosing. The composer then adheres to this succession, or a variation of it. Several successive tones may be combined into chords to avoid merely repeating the entire row as a melodic line. Schoenberg developed the twelve-tone method partly to prevent himself from unconsciously slipping back into tonal patterns of thought and partly to enable himself to organize large spans of atonal music in a coherent manner. At first, Schoenberg's pupils, such as the Austrian composers Alban Berg and Anton von Webern, were the only ones who adopted his technique. Within 30 to 40 years of its appearance, however, most major composers of the 20th century had used the method.
The other harmonic styles in 20th-century music include polytonality, or the simultaneous use of more than one tonality, and modality, or the use of modes and scales from the Renaissance and earlier. The Hungarian composer Béla Bartók based much of his harmonic style on the modes of old Hungarian folk music.
Microtonal music, another 20th-century innovation, is also based on a harmonic concept. In microtonal music, however, the octave has been divided into more than the usual 12 tones, which means that some of the tones, the so-called microtones, sound slightly sharp or flat when compared with the tones of a normal Western scale.
Neoclassicism, which developed in the 1920s, is a comprehensive style involving more than harmonic features. It marked a return to the classic concept that all elements in a composition should contribute to the clarity of the overall structure of form. Neoclassicism included the use of a modified sense of tonality, usually enlivened with a large amount of chromaticism, and the use of formal schemes from the baroque and classical eras. The most prominent representatives of neoclassicism were Igor Stravinsky and the German-born Paul Hindemith. Others included the Russian Sergey Prokofiev and Dmitry Shostakovich. Many American composers have embraced the principles of neoclassicism, largely as a result of their years of study in Paris with the French composer-teacher Nadia Boulanger. These Americans included Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland, Walter Piston, and Virgil Thomson.
Beginning in 1948, the French engineer and composer Pierre Schaeffer and a few other composers in Paris began to record sounds such as street noises and to combine them in various ways. They called the result musique concrète (French, "concrete music") because their music consisted of sounds from everyday life rather than abstract and artificial sounds as produced by musical instruments. Musique concrète marked the beginning of electronic music, in which electronic equipment, including computers, is used to generate sounds, modify them, and combine them with each other. By the late 1960s many hundreds of studios in all parts of the world had been equipped with electronic equipment for composers to use.
Two other innovations in 20th-century music are serialism and indeterminacy, or chance. Serialism is based on the principle of the twelve-tone method. An order of succession is established for rhythmic values for levels of loudness, for example, as well as for pitches. All of these so-called rows are then repeated during the course of the work. The technique is sometimes called total serialism to distinguish it from the limited serialism involved in the twelve-tone method. The serial composers have included Olivier Messiaen and his pupil Pierre Boulez, both French; Karlheinz Stockhausen, a German; Ernst Krenek, an Austrian; and Milton Babbitt, an American.
Music involving indeterminacy leaves some aspect of the music to chance. The role of chance may take many different forms. For instance, during the process of composition the composer might base some choices of sounds on the outcome of a game of dice or cards; or the composer might write several pages of music and let the performer choose which pages to play and the order in which to play them. Or, instead of using traditional musical notation, the composer might prepare a design of lines and shapes and ask the performer to devise some combination of sounds that will be equivalent to the design. The composers who use indeterminate procedures have included the Americans, John Cage and Earle Brown. Other composers such as the Argentine Alberto Ginastera and the Greek Yannis Xenakis have written music with certain indeterminate elements. Most composers in the late 20th century freely draw on serial, electronic, indeterminate, and other techniques.
Opera has suffered in the 20th century from rising labor costs and declining subsidies, which were generously provided in previous centuries from royal and state treasuries. The genre nevertheless remains so attractive that only a handful of important 20th-century composers have not written at least one opera. Those 20th-century composers whose operas have proven most popular include the German composers Richard Strauss and Hans Werner Henze and the British composer Benjamin Britten. Music for the dance, previously neglected by most major composers except Tchaikovsky, began to receive the attention of most 20th-century composers, notably Prokofiev, Ravel, and Stravinsky.
Although music in the 20th century seems to encompass a bewildering variety of procedures and approaches, one feature has emerged since 1950 as common to most progressive works. This is the emphasis on sounds, their qualities, textures, densities, and durations. For the first time in the history of Western music, this element has begun to take precedence over all others, including melody, which may not be present at all, and harmony, which may be treated merely as one component in a series of sound complexes.
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