Music History Final Sp 2026

Surrealism

an avant-garde style that mirrors the surrealist art movement by using unexpected juxtapositions, dreamlike imagery, and automatic techniques to bypass conscious control and explore the subconscious

Dadaism

an anti-art, avant-garde movement that rejected traditional musical structures, harmony, and logic in favor of noise, chance, and absurdity, often as a protest against World War I. It utilized bruitism (noise music), simultaneous chanting, and everyday sounds to blur the line between music and non-music.

Expressionism

an early 20th-century avant-garde movement that rejected traditional beauty to explore deep, often dark, human emotions.

atonal

a style of composition that lacks a traditional tonal center, key, or home base

Skandalkonzert

Vienna, March 1913

An infamous concert of new music, organized by Schoenberg, which ended in a riot

Second Viennese School

Schoenberg, Webern, Berg

an influential early 20th-century modernist musical movement in Vienna

Free atonal

a style of 20th-century music that deliberately avoids a central key, tonal center, or traditional harmonic hierarchies

Viennese trichord

a three-note musical set (trichord) consisting of a perfect fourth and a tritone (prime form [0, 1, 6]), often featuring a root, tritone, and a semitone

Sprechstimme

vocal technique that bridges speaking and singing,

where the performer follows notated rhythm and pitch contours but approximates pitches rather than sustaining them

Pierrot ensemble

a musical ensemble comprising flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano. This ensemble is named after 20th-century composer Arnold Schoenberg's seminal work Pierrot lunaire

12-tone method

a system of musical composition developed by Arnold Schoenberg in the 1920s, ensuring all 12 notes of the chromatic scale are treated with equal importance

First introduced (to his students) in 1923; he had been developing it for about 9 years

Derived row

rows whose non-overlapping segments (discrete segments) belong to the same set class

Klangfarbenmelodie

a musical concept that treats timbre as a melodic element.

Neo-classicism

A reaction against the excesses of

Romanticism

• A “neo-classical” composer returned to

smaller forms & ensembles

• Deliberately simple textures; periodic phrases

• BUT with “modern” ingredients thrown in:

unresolved dissonance, unexpected

modulations, asymmetrical meters, etc.

• (Term is misleading: many composers went

further back than the Classic era!)

Les Six

Group of Parisian neo-classical composers

• Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric,

Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Germaine Tailleferre

Ballets Russes

Russian Ballet, based in Paris

3 periods of Stravinsky's style

• 1901-1918: “Russian” period (student works, pieces written while still in Russia)

• 1920-1954: Neo-classic period

• 1954-1968: Serial/12-tone period

Rite of Spring premiere

May 29, 1913. There was a big riot due to how different the ballet was from traditional ballet. People did not like the story are the use of choreo.

Bolshevik Revolution

fundamentally transformed Russian music, shifting it from a pre-revolutionary "Silver Age" of experimentalism to a state-controlled tool for spreading communist ideology

Post-war avant-garde

a radical, experimental movement, breaking from traditional harmony to explore new sonic landscapes through technology and structure.

Key movements included serialism, musique concrète, aleatoric (chance) music, and minimalism, often aiming to challenge the nature of sound itself.

Soviet Union & Shostakovich

a premier Soviet composer whose career, spanning 15 symphonies and numerous chamber works, represents the ultimate musical struggle between personal artistic expression and totalitarian oppression.

Integral (total) serialism

a post-WWII compositional method that extends twelve-tone serial techniques beyond just pitch to control all musical elements systematically. It organizes parameters such as duration (rhythm), dynamics (volume), timbre, register, and articulation

Tape music/fixed media

a genre of electroacoustic music where sounds are pre-recorded, manipulated, and arranged onto a storage medium (historically magnetic tape, now digital files) for playback

Indeterminacy

compositional approach where certain aspects of a musical work are left to chance, or to the performer's discretion

Chance

a style of composition where certain elements of the music are left to chance rather than being completely dictated by the compose

Structured aleatory

specific musical elements—such as pitch, rhythm, or form—are left to chance or performer improvisation, yet within strict, pre-defined constraints set by the composer. It blends composed structure with unpredictable, real-time performance decisions

Color-field technique

a compositional approach that mirrors the visual arts movement of the same name (1950s–60s), prioritizing massive, immersive sonic textures and long-sustained tones over traditional melody, harmony, or dramatic development

Minimalism

an avant-garde movement that strips compositions down to their fundamental element

• Repetition and Looping

• Gradual Evolution

• Steady Pulse

• Consonance

Post-minimalism

a reaction to strict, hypnotic minimalism. It retains the steady pulses, repeating patterns, and tonal harmonies of early minimalism, but incorporates richer melodies, faster musical development, and a wider variety of influences

New Complexity

extremely detailed, challenging notation, dense polyphonic textures, and intricate, multi-layered, or nested rhythmic structures

Neo-tonalism

establishes a tonal center or focal chord without utilizing traditional 18th-century functional harmony (tonic-dominant relationships).

It acts as a bridge between traditional tonality and atonality