5.20 Music and Modernism

Modernist/Modernism

“a special self-consciousness,” and artists and intellectuals who “insisted on” anti-traditionalism

avant-garde

military term repurposed to describe the activity of radical artists and thinkers

Impressionism

the modernist movement in which light-capturing techniques are developed (“realists”) starting in the 1870s; inspired by French painters

Symbolism

unrealistic movement after impressionism in which words freely symbolized/signified

Expressionism

German movement which sought to express the most extreme human feelings by divorcing art from everyday literalness

diatonic scale

Scale of the octave's 8 notes; foundation in Western music

pentatonic scale

5 note scale playable on the black keys of a piano (derived from folk song and Asian music)

Whole-tone scale

Divides the octave into 6 equal parts w/ whole step intervals

Octatonic scale

Fits eight pitches into the octave by alternating whole and half steps

Serialism

the use of the “new language for music” invented by Schoenberg in the 1920s

Consonance

when pitches sound stable and at rest in combination

Dissonance

when pitches sound tense in combination- sound like they need to resolve to consonance, but they now were not always resolved

Atonal

Describes music with no tonal center