Musical characteristics of the 20th century

1. Melody: Traditional music is based on fluency, natural fluctuation and regular progress. Music melody in the 20th century is often not smooth, jumping violently, sometimes not reading sentences, and sometimes avoiding the melody factors in traditional music, and replacing melody with other vocal methods.

2. Rhythm and beat: Rhythm is the skeleton of traditional music and is well organized; In modern music, the rhythm is free and changeable, some have polyrhythm, no rhythm, no beat, no bar line, some have the player's free arrangement of rhythm, and some have "only rhythm".

3. Harmony: Traditional music is based on harmony and triad; Modern music breaks this concept. Based on sound sense, there is no chord structure and function of traditional music. Eleven chords and thirteen chords are commonly used, and sound groups and plate sound groups are adopted. Even the concept of chord no longer exists.

4. Mode and tonality: Traditional music is centered on major and minor, while modern music is often atonal. Some create their own scales and musical order, while others do not move in the melody category, thus losing the significance of mode tonality.

5, orchestration: traditional concerts optimize the combination of each group of instruments, and the timbre emphasizes balance; Modern music, on the other hand, emphasizes the extreme range and noise commonly used by individual instruments, highlights percussion and seeks new timbre and vocal instruments.

Extended data:

The main music schools in the 20th century can be roughly divided into:

1, impressionist music

This kind of music is the first art school that rose in the field of painting from the end of 1 9 to the beginning of the 20th century. Its style originated from a painting by Monet, Impression: Sunrise. Impressionist painters pay attention to the change of light and color, and express their love for life and nature in ordinary themes.

Impressionist music is the pioneer of music schools in the 20th century. Before the First World War, it was produced under the influence of impressionism in the field of literature and painting, and was retained as a new musical style title because of the appearance of Debussy's symphony suite Spring. Music mostly takes natural scenery or poetry and painting as the theme, actively expresses the instantaneous impression of objective things, and has a mysterious or hazy artistic conception.

It does not give priority to melody, but attaches importance to harmony and the color function of orchestration; Break through the system of major and minor tones and use diatonic and pentatonic scales; Increase the possibility of chord structure: replace triad and seventh chord with ninth chord, eleventh chord and thirteenth chord; Weakening the function of harmony, blurring tonality, using a lot of tone sandhi, and using more small genres.

The representative of this music genre:? French composer Debussy was deeply influenced by symbolist writers and poets such as Malamei. At the 1 8 8 9 Paris International Expo, he was inspired by the performance of Jawa Gamelan and the original music of Musorgskiy. He praised Wagner, but thought Wagner's road was unique and not applicable to others.

Therefore, he embarked on a unique road of music creation and became the originator of impressionist music. Representative works include piano works, prints, moonlight, orchestral works, pastoral afternoons, and opera pelias and Melissa.

2. Expressionist music

This kind of music is an art school that rose in Germany and Austria at the beginning of the 20th century before the First World War. As the antonym of impressionism, it appeared in the field of painting and poetry in Germany, represented by Kandinsky, and then extended to the field of music. Its appearance has certain social reasons:

At that time, Germany practiced autocratic rule, and social contradictions were prominent and turbulent, which led to some artists and their subjective emotional expression; They think that the world is full of suffering, ugliness and terror, so they express their subjective feelings with exaggerated and distorted abstract geometric figures.

Main representative: Schoenberg, Austrian composer and music theorist. He and his two students, Berger and Wei Boen, are both representative composers of 1 2 music, and they became the "New Vienna Music School". Schoenberg's masterpieces include Pietro on the Moon, Survivor of Warsaw and Variations for a Band.

3. Neoclassical music

Also known as "new baroque music", it is one of the popular schools of modern music during the two world wars in the 1920s. Aesthetically, neoclassical music pursues balanced, stable and rational music, opposes the inflated subjective consciousness in post-romantic music and expresses strong personal feelings.

Oppose heteronomy, support self-discipline, put forward the idea of returning to Bach, adopt the absolute music form of "music is music", pay more attention to the technology and form of music, rather than the content, and replace emotional expression with music form. Specifically, it pursues the balance and symmetry of melody and rhythm.

Advocate a fresh and standardized music structure and oppose a free and loose structure; Advocate pure music, revive the genre form before romanticism, and oppose title music; Advocate miniaturization and indoor band preparation, and oppose huge band preparation.

However, this school often combines the musical forms of Bach and other composers with the new musical language of the 20th century, and tends to adopt the method of extended tonality or even atonality, with complex harmony, often adding the novel and discordant sounds of the 20th century, sharp, novel and discordant sounds peculiar to the orchestration, and changeable musical instrument timbre, so it did not return to the functional tonality system of the classical period, nor did it really reflect the true colors of the music of the Baroque period.

Therefore, people call this school of retro music "neoclassical music" to distinguish it from the classical period. The representative figure of neoclassical music school: Stravinsky; Russian-American composer, representing composers Firebird, Sacrifice to Spring and Puccinia.

4. Neo-nationalist music

Compared with the nationalist music in the19th century, the depth of neo-nationalist music in the 20th century in eulogizing the national content and people's life has been weakened, and composers pay attention to the connotation of folk music itself and the new discovery of its characteristics. In the processing of music materials, neo-nationalist music emphasizes the absorption of people's inherent characteristics and melodies, and creates according to folk modes, scales and rhythms.

In the absorption of musical features, this kind of music is more or less influenced by some new composing techniques. The representative figure of this music genre: Bartok; Hungarian composer, whose representative works include piano textbooks such as Small Universe and Dedicated to Children. Opera "The Castle of Duke Bluebeard" and so on.

In addition to the above four kinds, music in the 20th century also appeared: differential music, noise music, sequence music, occasional music, electronic music and other musical forms. Since 1970s, the development of music in the 20th century has shown a diversified trend.

No style occupies a central position. Composers pay attention to the creation and discovery of new techniques, new acoustics and new tricks, and make more use of the new expression techniques accumulated in the past decades to combine with traditional music to create. Romantic trend of thought is gradually returning, and atonal music is quietly withdrawing from the music trend.

Baidu Encyclopedia-Modern Music