Although any music is essentially contemporary at the time when it is created, whatever its style, the term modern music is currently used to indicate the various currents appeared after the end of the Second world war and having jointly a questioning radical of the Paradigme S of the tonal music established since the 18th century.

In wikipedia, the type-setters of first half of the 20th century were indexed in the modern Musique.
Arrived at the borders of the harmonic and stylistic exploration of the romantic Music, the Compositeur S of the beginning of the 20th century tried to untie traditional systems. With this intention, they tried to purify the listening of the music of its eternal couplings between tensions and relaxations that the Tonalité had inculcated to him. The “extra-tonality” got busy to explore, sometimes by them combining, sometimes the method (Debussy, Moussorgski…), sometimes harmonic space in its entirety (Dodecaphony), sometimes rhythmic space (Igor Stravinski…).

Then the type-setters ran up against the instruments directly inherited the 19th century and which could only confine the concerned users of innovation to testing complexifications. Only the upheavals caused by the appearance of the electric, electroacoustic technical then data-processing their has truly open an unsuspected world hitherto, a world of “amazing” (with the clean direction) which builds a musical system only a posteriori. First half of the 20th century represents in this respect one key time where the experimentation by new techniques made it possible to be freed from last by creating a new form from Lutherie. But these techniques, not ductile enough, never could create a stamping from the traditional stringed-instrument trade. It is starting from the Fifties, and the arrival of the tape recorder, that new direct forms of composition on sound material could take place. Edgard Varèse was one of the precursors in this field. Another later contribution, of the instrumentalists, is to them-even that of the Modes of play which on the basis of traditional stringed-instrument trade also develops the space of the instrumental Timbre.

Precursors

  • the Second school of Vienna (Arnold Schönberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern) creates a music where the organization of the Harmonie and melody is replaced, initially in an empirical way then in a theoretical and systematic way, by using the series, combination using as bases the twelve chromatic semitones , base of the Serial music.

  • After the experiments of the futuristic Italian of the beginning of the 20th century (the Bruitisme of Luigi Russolo), Edgard Varèse mingles with its music with the industrial noises and is worried as many stamp and rate/rhythm that of melody and Harmonie.
  • Charles Ives adds to his music of the elements of quasi put in scene, and uses techniques of Collage.
  • Olivier Messiaen supports the rates/rhythms and the intensities and integrates them in serial scales (study for Modes piano of value and intensity).

Post-serialists

If the serialism were a religion, its only God would be Anton Webern, his prophet (in France) Rene Leibowitz and its caliphs Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono, Bruno Maderna, Luciano Berio, Karlheinz Stockhausen… Among the pagan converts one would find large the Igor Stravinski, during its last time. Among the heretics and the renegades one would find… makes some one would find about all those referred to above.

Strict at its beginnings, towards 1950, then less and less, this tendency continues the serial technique inherited the Second school of Vienna, by generalizing it with the stamps, the durations, the intensities… The work which illustrates best this “orthodoxe” tendency of the beginnings is undoubtedly the first book of the Structures for two pianos of Pierre Boulez.

Electronic music, electroacoustic and data processing

Edgard Varèse was, following Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, one of the precursors of this music. They very early integrated all electronic instruments into their works, mixed recorded instruments and sounds ( Orphée 51 or all the quadrant of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry 1951, Déserts , 1954 of Edgard Varèse) and created works of pure Electronic music ( electronic Poème , 1958). As of 1917, Varèse wrote: “I dream of instruments obeying with the thought and which, with the contribution of a flowering of unsuspected stamps, lend itself to the combinations that I will like it to impose to them.”

During Years 1950 and 1960, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luciano Berio, Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono and György Ligeti will also try either to create works with electronic sounds (recorded on tape), or to mix recorded sounds and instrumental execution; but technology being rather rudimentary at the time, the majority of them will give up it temporarily. György Ligeti ( Glissandi , 1957), Luciano Berio ( Thema (Omaggio has Joyce) , 1958), Pierre Henry ( High Voltage ,]) or Karlheinz Stockhausen ( Gesang der Jünglinge , 1956 and Kontakte , 1959) created as of the end of the Années 1950 the first works of the electronic music or electroacoustic. These techniques evolved/moved considerably, in particular with the appearance of the Informatique and the various methods of treatment and sound Synthèse.

The representatives of these techniques in France are inter alia Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer, inventor of the Concrete music in 1948 and which founded the Groupe of music research ( GRM ) in 1958. They tried, with the assistance of the record player then Magnétophone, to implement a new sound art. This music on tape, born from research on nature from sound and musical, is indicated like " concrète" for the inversion of the process of composition which characterizes it. Instead of starting from these abstract values that are the notes to go towards the concrete one of a sound result, this music takes for departure of the recorded sound data, of acoustic or electronic origin, organized by assembly and mixing, where the composition is founded on the direct listening of the result in a constant return ticket of making intend it to lead finally to this abstraction which is the music. It is the concrete step . One will note there an opposition between a technique of the “sound object” put in context (Pierre Schaeffer) and tendencies more “atmospheric” (Ivo Malec).

Since the arrival of the Personal computer, the electronic treatment of the its makes it possible to create new forms of instrumentalisation of the music, as well on the level of the synthesis of the sound as of the formalism of the composition (musical Informatique).

There is not only one formula of Electronic music, but of many alternatives:

  • use of electronic instruments by musicians in flesh and bone (Waves Martenot, Thérémine S…)
  • work purely electroacoustic or electronics, preregistered (GRM, Studios of Cologne and Milan). Does the public representation of these works pose problem (that to put on scene?), which returns this format more adapted to the radiophonic diffusion or the accompaniment of a visual spectacle.
  • mixed works bandages/orchestra ( Déserts of Varèse, of many works of Nono, Ivo Malec, François-Bernard Mâche…). The interest consists of the fusion of two very different universes: that of the its instrumental, generally well determined height, played by a musician, and that of all the possible sounds (sometimes of the noises without given height), that of the music recorded with immutable temporality and the musician in flesh and bone which must be synchronized.
  • transformations of its acoustics by electronic means into real-time (GRM with Syter - System Real Time, '' Répons '' of Pierre Boulez with IRCAM).

In the case of the music “for band” (called according to the times, the places and the schools Concrete music, experimental Music, Music electroacoustic, Slap music, Elektronische Musik or acousmatic Music), the sound recorded itself can be produced various manners:

  • its of synthesis, electronics or data processing;
  • its instrumental or vocal traditional transformed;
  • its not-musical naturalness a priori (“”) transformed or not.

Repetitive American

The repetitive Musique is represented by the following musicians: Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Philip Glass, John Coolidge Adams… remote Heirs to a certain mechanism/modernism (Mossolov, Prokofiev, Honegger, some Bartók…).

György Ligeti wrote certain works ( Kammerkonzert , 2nd string quartet ) using similar techniques episodically.

Techniques used by other type-setters in a less systematic way: Harrison Birtwistle, Luciano Berio ( Points one the curve to find )…

Emblematic works: In C of Terry Riley; Like Out and Music for 18 Musicians of Steve Reich; Violin Concerto of Philip Glass; Nixon in Clouded John Coolidge Adams.

The conceptual ones

John Cage, Mauricio Kagel, Karlheinz Stockhausen (starting from 1960). Music with spectacle where the Happening (or performance , in its Anglo-Saxon direction) and interpretation are inseparable from the music, which becomes in certain even anecdotic secondary cases and is there only to illustrate a Idée. Its representative emblématique is of course John Cage, but almost all yielded to differing degree emulously “to impress the middle-class man”.

Emblematic work: “4 ' 33" ” of John Cage (they are 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence).

The spectral school

The term was invented by the type-setter Hugues Dufourt in an article of 1979. It is generally used to indicate techniques of composition developed mainly by the type-setters Tristan Murail and Gerard Grisey, even if this last were identified little in this term and would have preferred the term of “liminal music”, which summarized its thought of musical time better.

The spectral music, in a restrictive direction, is mainly based on the discovery of the nature of the musical stamp and the spectral decomposition of the Its musical, at the origin of the perception of this stamp. Certain works like Atmospheres of György Ligeti, Stimmung of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Metastasis of Iannis Xenakis, Changes of Jean-Claude Risset and Stria with John Chowning directly influenced this movement, by their ambivalence harmony-stamp.

The “spectral” music tries to synthesize with the orchestra or with an instrumental whole of the temporal evolutions of more or less disturbed sounds. It uses for that of the techniques microtonales of orchestration supporting an amalgamated perception, which is that of the stamp, and of the continuous processes of transformation of material in time. Tristan Murail, Gerard Grisey, Hugues Dufourt and Michael Levinas will develop this research, while incorporating in it of the techniques derived from the analyze-synthesis by computer, which made it possible to return in the details of the representation of the stamp. They will apply thus to the writing for traditional instruments of the techniques previously discovered in electroacoustics like the frequency modulation, the loop of re-injection, the compression of spectra, or the dilation of a sound in time. Aesthetically, this school was opposed to the serial music and more generally to a combinative music, preferring to think the complex sound like a continuum, parallel microscopic of continuous formal macroscopic which is a work of music. Horatiu Radulescu developed another spectral writing based on the " spectrale" will scordatura; comprising intervals unequal, very few in the low register and increasingly many while going up towards the acute one.

It is about an esthetic school in the direction where it influenced many younger type-setters: Philippe Hurel, Philippe Leroux, Marc-Andre Dalbavie, Jean-Luc Herve, Thierry Went, Fabien Levy, Xu Yi or Thierry Blondeau in France; Kaija Saariaho or Magnus Lindberg in Finland; George Benjamin or Julian Anderson in the United Kingdom, to quote only some of them.

The postmodern ones

In reaction to the modernism, and probably with an aim of regaining a lost public, a certain number of type-setters “turn over to the tonality”, and until reaching an extreme simplicity sometimes, in a step which points out that of Erik Satie but without its provocative side: complete absence of even momentary modulation, rates/rhythms using only simple values, harmonizes voluntarily awkward, repetitive structures at Michael Nyman, Philip Glass or Steve Reich for example. Finally some are directed towards the diagram of religious inspiration like Arvo Pärt.

Other type-setters on the contrary offer orchestrations of a very high subtlety (Henryk Górecki), a polystylism of a great richness (Alfred Schnittke), or rhythmic structures complex (Michel Lysight).

The musical postmodernism cannot thus be summarized on a return to simplicity: it is a will to join again the communication. For the postmodern ones, the problem of the language, the systemic thirst for modern are non-problems which created a dramatic gap between the creators and the consumers of music " savante". According to them, the music is a language which supports the evolutions best that the revolutions.

Other type-setters

See too

  • Art acousmatic and acousmatic music

External bonds

Institutional bonds
  • 3icar the International institute for the Innovation, Artistic creation and Research gathers the icarensemble, icaréditions and icarrecherche.
  • Cdmc (Information center of the modern music) proposes biographies of type-setters, their works. Consult the catalog on line and download the seminars in mp3.
  • CeBeDeM Centers Belgian musical documentation
  • Dossiers of the media library of the IRCAM on the contemporary type-setters
Alternative bonds
  • Initiation with the modern music, selection of works by " levels of difficulté"
  • musiquecontemporaine.info Friends, Amateurs, Curious about the modern music - All to know, more beautiful pieces, of 1945 with today
  • Futurs Compounds Collective for contemporary Musical creation in Ile-de-France
  • Panorama, history of the electronic musics, electroacoustics
  • Contemporary Compositeurs, by gP Database of contemporary type-setters with their photograph and of the works written after 1925.

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