20th-Century Modern & Experimental Music Vocabulary

Vocabulary flashcards covering key styles, composers, and concepts in Impressionism, Expressionism, and experimental electronic and chance music.

Impressionism (music)

A 20th-century style that prioritizes atmosphere and suggestion over overt emotion or narrative, using ambiguous chords, whole-tone or modal scales, irregular phrases, and coloristic orchestration.

Claude Debussy

French composer regarded as a chief figure of musical Impressionism, famous for creating shimmering harmonic colors and fluid forms.

Maurice Ravel

French Impressionist composer known for refined orchestration and innovative harmonic language that evokes vivid sonic colors.

Expressionism (music)

An intense, psychologically charged style that abandons traditional tonality in favor of atonality, sharp dissonance, angular melodies, and dark themes.

Arnold Schoenberg

Austrian Expressionist composer who pioneered atonality and later the twelve-tone method, profoundly reshaping 20th-century music.

Atonality

The absence of a tonal center or key, producing music that avoids conventional harmonic expectations; central to Expressionism.

Electronic Music

Music generated or altered with electronic technologies such as synthesizers, computers, DAWs, or tape recorders, often pushing sonic boundaries.

Theremin

One of the earliest electronic instruments, played without touch by moving hands near two antennas that control pitch and volume, yielding eerie, sci-fi sounds.

Musique Concrète

Experimental genre that manipulates recorded real-world sounds—editing, looping, reversing—to create new musical works; originated by Pierre Schaeffer in the 1940s.

Chance Music (Aleatoric Music)

A compositional approach where certain elements are determined by random procedures or performer choice, emphasizing unpredictability and spontaneity.

John Cage

American composer and thinker who popularized chance music, explored silence, and challenged conventional definitions of music.

4′33″

John Cage’s landmark 1952 piece in which performers remain silent for 4 minutes 33 seconds, letting ambient sounds become the music.