Born in Vienna, moved to Berlin, then to US (in 1933)
Near the end of July 1921, Schoenberg told a pupil, “Today I have discovered something which will assure the supremacy of German music for the next 100 years.” That “something” was a method of composition with 12 tones related only to one another.
The rise of National Socialism in Germany in 1933 led to the extirpation of Jewish influence in all spheres of German cultural life. Schoenberg was dismissed from his post at the academy. He immigrated to the United States via Paris, where he formally returned to the Jewish faith, which he had abandoned in his youth. In November 1933 he took a position at the Malkin Conservatory in Boston, and in 1934 he moved to California, where he spent the remainder of his life, becoming a citizen of the United States in 1941. He held major teaching positions at the University of Southern California (1935–36) and at the University of California at Los Angeles (1936–44).
Born in Hungary, Austria-Hungary [now Sânnicolau Mare, Romania]—died September 26, 1945, New York, NewYork, U.S.), Hungarian composer, pianist, ethnomusicologist, and teacher, noted for the Hungarian flavor of his major musical works, which include orchestral works, string quartets, piano solos, several stage works, a cantata, and a number of settings of folk songs for voice and piano.
Started composing at age 9, first piano performance at 11 including his own composition.
Shortly after Bartók completed his studies in 1903, he and the Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály, who collaborated with Bartók, discovered that what they had considered Hungarian folk music and drawn upon for their compositions was instead the music of city-dwelling Roma. A vast reservoir of authentic Hungarian peasant music was subsequently made known by the research of the two composers. The initial collection, which led them into the remotest corners of Hungary, was begun with the intention of revitalizing Hungarian music. Both composers not only transcribed many folk tunes for the piano and other media but also incorporated into their original music the melodic, rhythmic, and textural elements of peasant music. Ultimately, their own work became suffused with the folk spirit.
Bartók found it impossible to remain in Germany in the 30s. After a second concert tour of the United States in 1940, he immigrated there the same year. An appointment as research assistant in music at Columbia University, New York City, enabled him to continue working with folk music, transcribing and editing for publication a collection of Serbo-Croatian women’s songs, a part of a much larger recorded collection of Balkan folk music.
His legacy lies in four major areas of music—composition, performance, pedagogy, and ethnomusicology.
Danbury, CN - New York City
American composer known for a number of innovations that anticipated most of the later musical developments of the 20th century.
Ives received his earliest musical instruction from his father, who was a bandleader, music teacher, and acoustician who experimented with the sound of quarter tones.
Ives became an insurance clerk and part-time organist in New York City. In 1907 he founded the highly successful insurance partnership of Ives & Myrick, which he headed from 1916 to 1930. He devised the insurance concept of estate planning and considered his years in business a valuable human experience that contributed to the substance of his music. Nearly all his works were written before 1915; many lay unpublished until his death. Chronic diabetes and a hand tremor eventually forced him to give up composing and to retire from business.
In 1947 he received the Pulitzer Prize for his Third Symphony (The Camp Meeting; composed 1904–11).
employ sharp dissonance, polytonal harmonies, and polymetric constructions. He drew from European music what techniques he wished while experimenting with tone clusters, microtonal intervals, and elements of chance in music (in one bassoon part he directs the player to play whatever he wants beyond a specific point).
In The Unanswered Question (composed before 1908), a string quartet or string orchestra repeats simple harmonies; placed apart from them, a trumpet reiterates a question-like theme that is dissonantly and confusedly commented upon by flutes (optionally with an oboe or a clarinet).
Variations on America (1891; additions before 1894) is the earliest polytonal piece known.
In the second movement of Three Places in New England (also titled First Orchestral Set and A New England Symphony; 1903–14), the music gives the effect of two bands approaching and passing each other, each playing its own melody in its own key, tempo, and rhythm.
Erik Satie, original name in full Eric Alfred Leslie Satie. French composer whose spare, unconventional, often witty style exerted a major influence on 20th-century music, particularly in France.
From 1898 he lived alone in Arcueil, a Paris suburb, cultivating an eccentric mode of life and permitting no one to enter his apartment.
Satie’s music represents the first definite break with 19th-century French Romanticism; it also stands in opposition to the works of composer Claude Debussy.
Closely allied to the Dada and Surrealist movements in art, it refuses to become involved with grandiose sentiment or transcendent significance, disregards traditional forms and tonal structures, and characteristically takes the form of parody, with flippant titles, such as Trois morceaux en forme de poire (1903; Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear) and Embryons Desséchés (1913; Desiccated Embryos), and directions to the player such as “with much illness” or “light as an egg,” meant to mock works such as Debussy’s preludes.
This desire is reflected in piano pieces such as Trois Gnossiennes (1890), notated without bar lines or key signatures. Other early piano pieces, such as Trois Sarabandes (1887) and Trois Gymnopédies (1888), use then-novel chords that reveal him as a pioneer in harmony.
Satie was dismissed as a charlatan by musicians who misunderstood his irreverence and wit. They also deplored the nonmusical influences in his life—during his last 10 years his best friends were painters, many of whom he had met while a café pianist. Satie was nonetheless deeply admired by composers of the rank of Darius Milhaud, Maurice Ravel, and, in particular, Claude Debussy—of whom he was an intimate friend for close to 30 years.
Brooklyn, New York — Hollywood, California
He wrote primarily for the Broadway musical theatre, but important as well are his orchestral and piano compositions in which he blended, in varying degrees, the techniques and forms of classical music with the stylistic nuances and techniques of popular music and jazz.
Gershwin was the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants.
Bandleader Paul Whiteman and Gershwin shared the common goal of bringing respectability to jazz music, which in 1922 was still being regarded, as evidenced in a New York American editorial, as “degrading, pathological, nerve-irritating, sex-exciting music.” To this end, in late 1923 Whiteman asked Gershwin to compose a piece for an upcoming concert—entitled “An Experiment in Modern Music”. Legend has it that Gershwin forgot about the request. Writing at a furious pace in order to meet the deadline, Gershwin composed Rhapsody in Blue, perhaps his best-known work, in three weeks’ time. Owing to the haste in which it was written, Rhapsody in Blue was somewhat unfinished at its premiere. Gershwin improvised much of the piano solo during the performance, and conductor Whiteman had to rely on a nod from Gershwin to cue the orchestra at the end of the solo.
In 1925 Gershwin was commissioned by the Symphony Society of New York to write a concerto, prompting the composer to comment, “This showed great confidence on their part as I had never written anything for symphony before…I started to write the concerto in London, after buying four or five books on musical structure to find out what the concerto form actually was!”
Copland, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, was born in New York City and attended public schools there. An older sister taught him to play the piano, and by the time he was 15 he had decided to become a composer. As a first step Copland tried to learn harmony through a correspondence course.
Copland attended the newly founded school for Americans at Fontainebleau, where he came under the influence of Nadia Boulanger, a brilliant teacher who shaped the outlook of an entire generation of American musicians. He decided to stay on in Paris, where he became Boulanger’s first American student in composition.
After the mid 1930s there occurred a change of direction that was to usher in the most productive phase of Copland’s career. He well summed up the new orientation: “During these years I began to feel an increasing dissatisfaction with the relations of the music-loving public and the living composer. It seemed to me that we composers were in danger of working in a vacuum.” Furthermore, he realized that a new public for modern music was being created by the new media of radio, phonograph, and film scores: “It made no sense to ignore them and to continue writing as if they did not exist. I felt that it was worth the effort to see if I couldn’t say what I had to say in the simplest possible terms.” Copland therefore was led to what became a most significant development after the 1930s: the attempt to simplify the new music in order that it would have meaning for a large public.
The decade that followed saw the production of the scores that spread Copland’s fame throughout the world. Most important of these were the three ballets based on American folk material: Billy the Kid (1938), Rodeo (1942), and Appalachian Spring (1944; commissioned by dancer Martha Graham). To this group belong also El salón México (1936), an orchestral piece based on Mexican melodies and rhythms.
Born near St. Petersburg, Russia — died in NYC
Stravinsky had a revolutionary impact on musical thought and sensibility just before and after World War I, and his compositions remained a touchstone of modernism for much of his long working life.
He studied law and philosophy at St. Petersburg University (graduating in 1905), and only gradually became aware of his vocation for musical composition.
In 1902 he showed some of his early pieces to the composer Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov (whose son Vladimir was a fellow law student), and Rimsky-Korsakov was sufficiently impressed to agree to take Stravinsky as a private pupil, while at the same time advising him not to enter the conservatory for conventional academic training.
The premiere of The Firebird at the Paris Opéra on June 25, 1910, was a dazzling success that made Stravinsky known overnight as one of the most gifted of the younger generation of composers. This work showed how fully he had assimilated the flamboyant Romanticism and orchestral palette of his master. The Firebird was the first of a series of spectacular collaborations between Stravinsky and Diaghilev’s company. The following year saw the Ballets Russes’s premiere on June 13, 1911, of the ballet Petrushka, with Vaslav Nijinsky dancing the title role to Stravinsky’s musical score.
Meanwhile, Stravinsky had conceived the idea of writing a kind of symphonic pagan ritual to be called Great Sacrifice. The result was The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du printemps), the composition of which was spread over two years (1911–13).
The first performance of The Rite of Spring at the Théâtre des Champs Élysées on May 29, 1913, provoked one of the more famous first-night riots in the history of musical theatre. Stirred by Nijinsky’s unusual and suggestive choreography and Stravinsky’s creative and daring music, the audience cheered, protested, and argued among themselves during the performance, creating such a clamour that the dancers could not hear the orchestra. This highly original composition, with its shifting and audacious rhythms and its unresolved dissonances, was an early modernist landmark.
After World War I the Russian style in Stravinsky’s music began to fade, but not before it had produced another masterpiece in the Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920).
He abandoned the Russian features of his early style and instead adopted a Neoclassical idiom. Stravinsky’s Neoclassical works of the next 30 years usually take some point of reference in past European music—a particular composer’s work or the Baroque or some other historical style—as a starting point for a highly personal and unorthodox treatment that nevertheless seems to depend for its full effect on the listener’s experience of the historical model from which Stravinsky borrowed.
His instrumental works of the early 1920s include the Octet for Wind Instruments (1923), Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments (1924), Piano Sonata (1924), and the Serenade in A for piano (1925). These pieces combine a Neoclassical approach to style with what seems a self-conscious severity of line and texture.
In autumn 1939 Stravinsky had visited the United States to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University (later published as the The Poetics of Music, 1942), and in 1940 he and his new wife settled permanently in Hollywood, California. They became U.S. citizens in 1945.
After World War II a new musical avant-garde had emerged in Europe that rejected Neoclassicism and instead claimed allegiance to the serial, or 12-tone, compositional techniques of the Viennese composers Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton von Webern.
French-born American composer and innovator in 20th-century techniques of sound production.
In 1915 he immigrated to the United States.
Varèse’s music is dissonant, nonthematic, and rhythmically asymmetric; he conceived of it as bodies of sound in space. After the early 1950s, when he finally gained access to the electronic sound equipment he desired, he concentrated on electronic music.
Varèse actively promoted performances of works by other 20th-century performers and founded the International Composers’ Guild in 1921 and the Pan-American Association of Composers in 1926.
One of the principal German composers of the first half of the 20th century and a leading musical theorist.
He sought to revitalize tonality—the traditional harmonic system that was being challenged by many other composers—and also pioneered in the writing of Gebrauchsmusik, or “utility music,” compositions for everyday occasions. He regarded the composer as a craftsman (turning out music to meet social needs) rather than as an artist (composing to satisfy his own soul). As a teacher of composition he probably exerted an influence on most of the composers of the generation that followed him.
By the late 1920s Hindemith was regarded as the foremost German composer of his generation.
Early works included chamber music composed for the Amar-Hindemith Quartet, in which he played the viola; the song cycles Die junge Magd (1922; “The Young Maid”), based on poems by Georg Trakl, and Das Marienleben (1924, rev. 1948; “The Life of Mary”); and the opera Cardillac (1926), based on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Das Fräulein von Scuderi (“The Girl from Scuderi”).
The “utility” music he wrote for children’s games, youth groups, brass bands, radio plays, and other practical purposes reflected a functional trend in the culture of postwar Germany.
His greatest work, Mathis der Maler, an opera about the painter Matthias Grünewald and his struggles with society, caused a public imbroglio in Nazi Germany when Wilhelm Furtwängler conducted an orchestral version with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1934 and vigorously supported the opera in the press. The Nazi cultural authorities, led by Joseph Goebbels (minister of propaganda), banned the opera, denouncing the composer as a “cultural Bolshevist” and “spiritual non-Aryan.”
Russian composer, renowned particularly for his 15 symphonies, numerous chamber works, and concerti, many of them written under the pressures of government-imposed standards of Soviet art.
The Symphony No. 1 (1924–25) quickly achieved worldwide currency. The symphony’s stylistic roots were numerous; the influence of composers as diverse as Tchaikovsky and Paul Hindemith (and, avowedly, Shostakovich’s contemporary Sergey Prokofiev) is clearly discernible.
The cultural climate in the Soviet Union was remarkably free at that time; even the music of Igor Stravinsky and Alban Berg, then in the avant-garde, was played. Béla Bartók and Hindemith visited Russia to perform their own works, and Shostakovich openly experimented with avant-garde trends.
His satiric opera The Nose (composed 1927–28), based on Nikolay Gogol’s story “Nos,” displayed a comprehensive awareness of what was new in Western music.
Shostakovich’s incomparably finer second opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (composed 1930–32; revised and retitled Katerina Izmaylova), marked a stylistic retreat. Yet even this more accessible musical language was too radical for the Soviet authorities.
From 1928, when Joseph Stalin inaugurated his First Five-Year Plan, an iron hand fastened on Soviet culture, and in music a direct and popular style was demanded. Avant-garde music and jazz were officially banned in 1932.
Shostakovich did not experience immediate official displeasure, but when it came it was devastating. It has been said that Stalin’s anger at what he heard when he attended a performance of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District in 1936 precipitated the official condemnation of the opera and of its creator.
The composer’s next major work was his Symphony No. 5 (1937), which was described in the press as “a Soviet artist’s reply to just criticism.”
He composed his Symphony No. 7 (1941) in beleaguered Leningrad during the latter part of that year and finished it in Kuybyshev (now Samara), to which he and his family had been evacuated. The work achieved a quick fame, as much because of the quasi-romantic circumstances of its composition as because of its musical quality.
Shostakovich’s works written during the mid-1940s contain some of his best music, especially the Symphony No. 8 (1943), the Piano Trio (1944), and the Violin Concerto No. 1 (1947–48). Their prevailing seriousness, even grimness, was to contribute to Shostakovich’s second fall from official grace. When the Cold War began, the Soviet authorities sought to impose a firmer ideological control, demanding a more accessible musical language than some composers were currently using.
Yet he was not completely intimidated, and, in his String Quartet No. 4 (1949) and especially his Quartet No. 5 (1951), he offered a splendid rejoinder to those who would have had him renounce completely his style and musical integrity.
LA — NYC
American avant-garde composer whose inventive compositions and unorthodox ideas profoundly influenced mid-20th-century music.
Cage studied music with Richard Buhlig, Arnold Schoenberg, Adolph Weiss, and Henry Cowell. While teaching in Seattle (1938–40), he organized percussion ensembles to perform his compositions. He also experimented with works for dance, and his subsequent collaborations with the choreographer and dancer Merce Cunningham sparked a long creative and romantic partnership.
Cage’s early compositions were written in the 12-tone method of his teacher Schoenberg, but by 1939 he had begun to experiment with increasingly unorthodox instruments such as the “prepared piano” (a piano modified by objects placed between its strings in order to produce percussive and otherworldly sound effects).
Cage also experimented with tape recorders, record players, and radios in his effort to step outside the bounds of conventional Western music and its concepts of meaningful sound. The concert he gave with his percussion ensemble at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1943 marked the first step in his emergence as a leader of the American musical avant-garde.
Cage turned to Zen Buddhism and other Eastern philosophies and concluded that all the activities that make up music must be seen as part of a single natural process.
He came to regard all kinds of sounds as potentially musical, and he encouraged audiences to take note of all sonic phenomena, rather than only those elements selected by a composer. To this end he cultivated the principle of indeterminism in his music. He used a number of devices to ensure randomness and thus eliminate any element of personal taste on the part of the performer: unspecified instruments and numbers of performers, freedom of duration of sounds and entire pieces, inexact notation, and sequences of events determined by random means such as by consultation with the Chinese Yijing (I Ching).
In his later works he extended these freedoms over other media, so that a performance of HPSCHD (completed 1969) might include a light show, slide projections, and costumed performers, as well as the 7 harpsichord soloists and 51 tape machines for which it was scored.
Aleatoric Music
Aleatoric music, also called chance music, (aleatory from Latin alea, “dice”), 20th-century music in which chance or indeterminate elements are left for the performer to realize. The term is a loose one, describing compositions with strictly demarcated areas for improvisation according to specific directions and also unstructured pieces consisting of vague directives, such as “Play for five minutes.”
The indeterminate portion of aleatory music commonly occurs in two areas. The performers may be told to arrange the structure of the piece—e.g., by reordering its sections or by playing sections simultaneously as they wish. The musical score may also indicate points where performers are to improvise or even to include quasi-theatrical gestures. Such requirements may give rise to inventive notation, including brackets enclosing a blacked-out space, suggesting pitch area and duration of the improvisation.
Among notable aleatory works are Music of Changes (1951) for piano and Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1958), by the American composer John Cage, and Klavierstück XI (1956; Keyboard Piece XI), by Karlheinz Stockhausen of Germany.
Concert for Piano and Orchestra - Description by Jeremy Grimshaw:
Of his Piano Concerto (1958), John Cage observed, "I regard this work as one 'in progress' which I intend never to consider as in a final state, although I find each performance definitive." The Concerto relies to an extreme level upon chance operations both for its original conception and for each realization in performance. A few years earlier, Cage had begun exploring Eastern philosophies in general and the principle of I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes, in particular. One feature of the I Ching that Cage found particularly rich in compositional possibilities is a system by which the tossing of coins or sticks can be used to generate a series of random numbers.
Cage consulted the I Ching to determine the musical parameters of the Piano Concerto. The composer employed the results of his explorations to determine the number of notes, dynamic level, articulation, the use of accidentals, and timbre. The positions of the notes on each page were determined by observing the minute imperfections on the paper's surface. The players are allowed much license in interpreting their parts; an excerpt from the lengthy instructions that accompany the trombone part reads: "Though there are twelve pages, any amount of them may be played (including none)." The soloist is given even more material from which to create his role, while the conductor is given only two pages regarding the regulation of the work's widely variable length.
Certainly, audiences are never quite sure what to make of Cage's intractable Concerto. The classic recording of a 1958 performance at New York's Town Hall features, in addition to the noises emanating from the instruments onstage, intermittent guffaws, catcalls, and even a few attempts to end the piece altogether with premature applause. Given Cage's philosophies, it is likely that the composer sincerely appreciated such contributions from the audience.
Milton Byron Babbitt, (born May 10, 1916, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died January 29, 2011, Princeton, New Jersey).
American composer and theorist known as a leading proponent of total serialism—i.e., musical composition based on prior arrangements not only of all 12 pitches of the chromatic scale (as in 12-tone music) but also of dynamics, duration, timbre (tone colour), and register.
Born in Romania—died in Vienna, Austria)
Ligeti was a leading composer of the branch of avant-garde music concerned with shifting masses of sound and tone colors.
In the early 1960s he caused a sensation with his Future of Music—A Collective Composition (1961) and his Poème symphonique (1962). The former consists of the composer regarding the audience from the stage and the audience’s reactions to this; the latter is written for 100 metronomes operated by 10 performers.
Born in Oneglia, Italy—died in Rome)
Italian musician, whose success as theorist, conductor, composer, and teacher placed him among the leading representatives of the musical avant-garde.
His style is notable for combining lyric and expressive musical qualities with the most advanced techniques of electronic and aleatory music.
He founded (1954) the Studio di Fonologia Musicale at Milan Radio. Under Berio’s direction until 1959, it became one of the leading electronic music studios in Europe. There he attacked the problem of reconciling electronic music with musique concrète (i.e., composition using as raw material recorded sounds such as storms or street noises rather than laboratory-created sounds).
Born Charleston, W.Va.
American composer known for his innovative techniques in the use of vivid sonorities obtained from an enormous range of instrumental and vocal effects, such as hissing, whispering, tongue clicking, and shouting at specified points in the composition.
Black Angels (1970), for electric string quartet. The first section is called Night of the Electric Insects, he composed this in honor of his students who had to travel and fight in Vietnam. This is supposed to make one feel uneasy. The piece is actually supposed to be played in a little lighting as possible, and only four instrumentalists are playing, the whole time. At one point the bow glasses filled with water, quite an interesting technique.
Star-Child (1977), a huge choral and orchestral composition that requires the use of four conductors; Celestial Mechanics
Makrokosmos IV (1978); and Apparition (1980). Crumb taught at the University of Colorado (1959–64) and, from 1965, at the University of Pennsylvania (from 1983, Annenberg professor).
Born Debica, Poland
He first drew attention in 1959 at the third Warsaw Festival of Contemporary Music, where his Strophes for soprano, speaker, and 10 instruments was performed.
The following year was marked by the performances of both Anaklasis and the Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima for 52 strings. The Threnody illustrates Penderecki’s skilled and refined treatment of instruments, making use of quarter-tone clusters (close groupings of notes a quarter step apart), glissandi (slides), whistling harmonics (faint, eerie tones produced by partial string vibrations), and other extraordinary effects.
Penderecki’s Canon for 52 strings (1962) made use of polyphonic techniques (based on interwoven melodies) known to Renaissance composers. Yet he also made some use of the techniques of aleatory (chance) music, percussive vocal articulation, nontraditional musical notation, and other devices that stamped him as a leader of the European avant-garde.
Born Lawrence, Massachusetts—died New York, New York
American conductor, composer, and pianist noted for his accomplishments in both classical and popular music, for his flamboyant conducting style, and for his pedagogic flair, especially in concerts for young people.
In 1943 Bernstein was appointed assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic; the first signal of his forthcoming success came on November 14, 1943, when he was summoned unexpectedly to substitute for the conductor Bruno Walter. His technical self-assurance under difficult circumstances and his interpretive excellence made an immediate impression and marked the beginning of a brilliant career.
From 1958 to 1969 Bernstein was conductor and musical director of the New York Philharmonic, becoming the first American-born holder of those posts. With this orchestra he made several international tours in Latin America, Europe, the Soviet Union, and Japan.
His popularity increased through his appearances not only as conductor and pianist but also as a commentator and entertainer.
Bernstein explained classical music to young listeners on such television shows as Omnibus and Young People’s Concerts.
After 1969 he continued to write music and to perform as a guest conductor with several symphonies throughout the world.
As a composer Bernstein made skillful use of diverse elements ranging from biblical themes, to jazz rhythms, Jewish liturgical themes, as in the Symphony No. 3 (1963; Kaddish).
His best-known works are the musicals On the Town (1944; filmed 1949), Wonderful Town (1953; filmed 1958), Candide (1956), and the very popular West Side Story (1957; filmed 1961), written in collaboration with Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins. He also wrote the scores for the ballets Fancy Free (1944), Facsimile (1946), and Dybbuk (1974), and he composed the music for the film On the Waterfront (1954), for which he received an Academy Award nomination. His Mass, written especially for the occasion, was performed at the opening of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., in September 1971.
In 1989 he conducted two historic performances of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D Minor (1824; Choral), which were held in East and West Berlin to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Born Paide, Estonia,
A devout Orthodox Christian, he developed a style based on the slow modulation of sounds such as those produced by bells and pure voice tones, a technique reminiscent of the medieval Notre-Dame school and the sacred music of Eastern Orthodoxy.
His major works include the violin concerto Tabula Rasa (1977), Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten (1977), Magnificat-Antiphones (1988), The Beatitudes (1991), and Lamentate (first performed 2003). His medieval liturgical sound won him a wide audience in the West during the late 1990s.
Developing an interest in the contemporary 12-tone system, he experimented with it in his own striking composition Nekrolog (1960), the first 12-tone piece written in Estonia. Pärt graduated from the conservatory in 1963. Soon afterward he composed his Symphony No. 1 (1964) and Symphony No. 2 (1966), the latter including quotations from the music of other composers.
Banned in the Soviet Union because of its religious text, Credo signaled the end of Pärt’s experimentation with the 12-tone system.
He immersed himself in the examination of such forms as the Gregorian chant and Orthodox liturgical music.
Pärt’s first work written in this new, austere style was a piano piece titled Für Alina (1976), the work in which he discovered the triad series, which he made his “simple, little guiding rule.” Describing the sound of the triad as like that of pealing bells, he called his new method of composition “tintinnabuli style.” With it he produced a simple, intense, and ravishing sound that seemed to communicate directly to a new generation in search of spiritual connection. It did not, however, win the approval of the authorities, and in 1980 Pärt moved with his family to Vienna; later he settled in West Berlin.
Born in Oakland, California and spent much of his early years in the American Southwest, where he was exposed to music and sound from a variety of cultures. He enrolled at the University of Southern California to study composition, but was dissatisfied and ultimately left to work on his own.
After the Great Depression ended, Harry again found success with small grants and support from the Guggenheim Foundation. In the period from 1941 - 1956, he composed and rewrote over a dozen works, invented and built over a dozen instruments, arranged several performances and recordings of his works, and wrote the first edition of his book, Genesis of a Music.
He composed using scales of unequal intervals in just intonation, and was one of the first 20th-century composers in the West to work systematically with microtonal scales. He built custom-made instruments in these tunings on which to play his compositions, and described his theory and practice in his book Genesis of a Music (1947).
Born Avignon, France—died Clichy, near Paris
French composer, organist, and teacher noted for his use of mystical and religious themes. As a composer he developed a highly personal style noted for its rhythmic complexity, rich tonal color, and unique harmonic language.
Messiaen became known as a composer with the performance of his Offrandes oubliées (“Forgotten Offertories”) in 1931 and his Nativité du Seigneur (1938; The Birth of the Lord).
Much of Messiaen’s music was inspired by Roman Catholic theology, interpreted in a quasi-mystical manner.
Messiaen’s method of composition is set forth in his treatise Technique de mon langage musical (1944; “Technique of My Musical Language”).
Quartet for the End of Time, French Quatuor pour la fin du temps, quartet in eight movements for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano. The piece premiered on January 15, 1941, at the Stalag VIIIA prisoner-of-war camp, in Görlitz, Germany, where the composer had been confined since his capture in May 1940. The work’s instrumentation was determined by the instruments and performers at hand.
Messiaen dedicated the quartet “in homage to the Angel of the Apocalypse, who raises his hand towards Heaven saying ‘There shall be no more time.’ ” The movement titles were drawn from the biblical Revelation to John.
Messiaen eschewed the usual tendency of Western music for regular rhythms and meters and instead offered ever-changing, often-unpredictable patterns, frequently based on prime numbers, especially 5, 7, 11, and 13. Clarinet and violin phrases tend to be reminiscent of bird songs, and motifs recur from one movement to another. The four instruments rarely play simultaneously.
Born NYC
One of the leading exponents of minimalism, a style based on repetitions and combinations of simple motifs and harmonies.
Like the works of fellow minimalist Philip Glass, Reich’s compositions rejected the characteristic complexity of mid-20th-century classical harmony and tonality in order to make large-scale works from minimal materials—a single chord, a brief musical motif, a spoken exclamation—which are repeated at length, with small variations introduced very slowly.
Early experiments with tape loops, documented in It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966), allowed Reich to observe interlocking rhythmic patterns that he would later reproduce compositionally; some of his works even combined both live and taped performers.
Reich drew additional inspiration from American vernacular music, especially jazz, as well as ethnic and ancient musics; he studied African drumming in Ghana (1970), Balinese gamelan music in Seattle and Berkeley, California (1973–74), and Middle Eastern chanting in New York City and Jerusalem (1976–77).
For Different Trains (1988), Reich integrated fragments of audio recordings pertaining to rail travel, including the reminiscences of Holocaust survivors, with a string quartet that mimicked both the rhythm of a train and the natural musicality of the voices on tape. The piece, as performed by the Kronos Quartet, won a Grammy Award for best contemporary composition in 1989.
Born Baltimore, Maryland.
American composer of innovative instrumental, vocal, and operatic music.
Glass studied flute as a boy and enrolled at age 15 at the University of Chicago, where he studied mathematics and philosophy and graduated in 1956.
His interest in atonal music drew him on to study composition at the Juilliard School of Music (M.S., 1962) in New York City and then to Paris to study under Nadia Boulanger.
His acquaintance there with the Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar decisively affected Glass’s compositional style, and he temporarily jettisoned such traditional formal qualities as harmony, tempo, and melody in his music. Instead he began creating ensemble pieces in a monotonous and repetitive style; these works consisted of a series of syncopated rhythms ingeniously contracted or extended within a stable diatonic structure.
Such minimalist music, played by a small ensemble using electronically amplified keyboard and wind instruments, earned Glass a small but enthusiastic following in New York City by the late 1960s.
Throughout his career, Glass collaborated with a broad array of international musicians representing diverse traditions. With Gambian kora player Foday Musa Suso he composed music for Jean Genet’s play The Screens; the work was scored for piano, kora, flute, cello, keyboards, and percussion. Glass composed Orion (2004) for sitar, pipa, didjeridu, kora, violin, and vocalists (alto and soprano); for the recording, Glass recruited the help of Suso, Shankar, and pipa player Wu Man, as well as other friends from the global music scene. He worked on numerous occasions with world music artists David Byrne and Paul Simon.
A vital figure in the wider artistic milieu, Glass cultivated relationships with artists who worked in other mediums as well, notably painter Chuck Close, who created his portrait in numerous media and for whom he composed A Musical Portrait of Chuck Close (2005).
Meanwhile, Glass continued to compose in the classical music vein, completing among other works his ninth symphony in 2010.
Glass founded the Philip Glass Ensemble, with which he still performs on keyboards.
The Philip Glass Ensemble is an American musical group founded by composer Philip Glass in 1968 to serve as a performance outlet for his experimental minimalist music. The Ensemble's instrumentation became a hallmark of Glass's early minimalist style. After Glass wrote his first opera, Einstein on the Beach, for the Ensemble in 1976, he began to compose for other instrumentation more frequently, but he still retains the core ensemble instrumentation.
Born New Rochelle, N.Y.
She studied piano as a child, attended Bennington College, and completed her music studies at Columbia University.
In 1969 she formed the Da Capo Chamber Players, for which she played piano and wrote many pieces; she left the group in 1984. She is chiefly known for her colorful and often whimsical orchestral compositions, including Sequoia (1981), Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman (1987), and Silver Ladder (1987).
Since 1972 she has taught at Bard College.
“Tower's efforts have immensely enriched American music...She has emerged as one of America's foremost and most colorful composer. Nearly impossible to pigeonhole stylistically, her numerous works for orchestra and chamber-music ensembles are characterized by rhythmic vitality, power, and often raw emotion.” — Stereophile
Her music is noted by a number of defining qualities:
Born Worcester, Mass.
American composer and conductor whose works were among the most performed of contemporary classical music.
Adams was the first Harvard student to be allowed to submit a musical composition as a senior honors thesis.
After graduation he moved to California, where from 1972 to 1982 he taught at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
In 1978 he founded and directed the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra’s series “New and Unusual Music,” and he was composer in residence with the orchestra from 1982 to 1985.
From 2003 through 2007 he held the composer’s chair at Carnegie Hall in New York City, where he founded the eclectic and diverse “In Your Ear” festival.
Although his early compositions were in an academic style, Adams soon began drawing on much broader sources, including pop, jazz, electronic music, and minimalism. His use of minimalist techniques—characterized by repetition and simplicity—came to be tempered by expressive, even neo-Romantic, elements.
His works encompass a wide range of genres and include Shaker Loops (1978), chamber music for string septet; Harmonium (1980), a cantata for chorus and orchestra using the poetry of John Donne and Emily Dickinson; Grand Pianola Music (1981–82), a reworking of early 20th-century American popular music for instrumental ensemble, three sopranos, and two pianos; Harmonielehre (1984–85), for orchestra, an homage to Arnold Schoenberg, whose music was the antithesis of minimalism; and Wound-Dresser (1988), for baritone and orchestra, a work based on Walt Whitman’s poems about his experience as a nurse in the American Civil War.
One of Adams’s especially popular orchestral works was the fanfare Short Ride in a Fast Machine (1986). The recording of another popular orchestral work, El Dorado (1991), won a 1997 Grammy Award. Later large-scale works include the Violin Concerto (1993) and My Father Knew Charles Ives (2003), for orchestra, which alludes to Ives’s works and compositional methods.
Adams’s most ambitious works, however, were his operas. The first two were created in collaboration with the director Peter Sellars, the poet Alice Goodman, and the choreographer Mark Morris. Nixon in China (1987) took as its subject the visit of U.S. Pres. Richard M. Nixon to China in 1972.
The composer’s third opera, Doctor Atomic (2005), was the story of the scientists in Los Alamos, N.M., U.S., who during World War II devised the first atomic bomb. Sellars compiled the libretto from a variety of sources, including the favorite poetry of the Los Alamos physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer as well as declassified government documents of the period.
In a departure from his 2005 statement that “if opera is actually going to be a part of our lives…it has to deal with contemporary topics,” Adams based his fourth opera, A Flowering Tree (2006), on South Indian folktales; again Sellars was his collaborator. The work was created in homage to Mozart, taking as its inspiration The Magic Flute (1791).
After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City commissioned a work from Adams: On the Transmigration of Souls, for orchestra, chorus, children’s choir, and prerecorded sound track, first performed Sept. 19, 2002. The text of the work derived from three sources: fragments from notices posted at the World Trade Center site by friends and relatives of the missing, interviews published in the New York Times, and randomly chosen names of victims. For this composition Adams was awarded the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in music; the recording won three 2004 Grammy Awards.