Traces the currents that have shaped the development of music in the twentieth century and discusses the contributions of such composers as Mahler, Debussy, Stockhausen, Vaughan Williams, Bartok, and Stravinsky

Ton de Leeuw was a truly groundbreaking composer. As evidenced by his pioneering study of compositional methods that melded Eastern traditional music with Western musical theory, he had a profound understanding of the complex and often divisive history of twentieth-century music. Now his renowned chronicle Music of the Twentieth Century is offered here in a newly revised English-language edition. Music of the Twentieth Century goes beyond a historical survey with its lucid and impassioned discussion of the elements, structures, compositional principles, and terminologies of twentieth-century music. De Leeuw draws on his experience as a composer, teacher, and music scholar of non-European music traditions, including Indian, Indonesian, and Japanese music, to examine how musical innovations that developed during the twentieth century transformed musical theory, composition, and scholarly thought around the globe.

Publisher Description

The twentieth century has seen a revolution in art music, with the great variety of conceptually opposed musical developments existing side by side. This book presents a study of this century's music from the point of view of its structure, without addressing collective styles, the mechanisms or techniques for sound manipulation, or the literature of the period. Rather, the essays in this book address questions of how form, timbre and texture, rhythm, line, chord, and ordering procedures are dealt with by twentieth-century composers in a wide variety of musical works from early to very recent examples.

Twentieth-Century Music Theory and Practice introduces a number of tools for analyzing a wide range of twentieth-century musical styles and genres. It includes discussions of harmony, scales, rhythm, contour, post-tonal music, set theory, the twelve-tone method, and modernism. Recent developments involving atonal voice leading, K-nets, nonlinearity, and neo-Reimannian transformations are also engaged. While many of the theoretical tools for analyzing twentieth century music have been devised to analyze atonal music, they may also provide insight into a much broader array of styles. This text capitalizes on this idea by using the theoretical devices associated with atonality to explore music inclusive of a large number of schools and contains examples by such stylistically diverse composers as Paul Hindemith, George Crumb, Ellen Taffe Zwilich, Steve Reich, Michael Torke, Philip Glass, Alexander Scriabin, Ernest Bloch, Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, Sergei Prokofiev, Arnold Schoenberg, Claude Debussy, György Ligeti, and Leonard Bernstein. This textbook also provides a number of analytical, compositional, and written exercises. The aural skills supplement and online aural skills trainer on the companion website allow students to use theoretical concepts as the foundation for analytical listening. Access additional resources and online material here: http: //www.twentiethcenturymusictheoryandpractice.net and https: //www.motivichearing.com/.

American Music in the Twentieth Century surveys the art music written in the United States during the last 100 years from the groundbreaking experiments of Charles Ives to the present day. Writing for the general reader, Kyle Gann describes the characteristic sounds of the diverse movements that have sprung up in this eventful period, while at the same time he sketches the changing social and cultural contexts for American concert music, and provides concise biographies of key figures.

Braun (Universitat der Bundeswehr) presents 13 contributions by scholars in two fields of history--musicology and technology. Topics include the role of Yamaha in Japan's musical development, the social construction of the synthesizer, the player piano as a precursor of computer music, the musical role of airplanes and locomotives, the origins of the 45-RPM record, violin vibrato and the phonograph, Jimi Hendrix, the aesthetic challenge of sound sampling, and others. Originally published in 2000 as I Sing the Body Electric: Music and Technology in the 20th Century. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.