20th Century Music Higher Impressionism – late 1900s Impressionism Often programmatic (descriptive) Chords used for expression Discords merge into further discords Parallel Chords Use of unusual scales – Modal – Pentatonic – Whole tone Whole Tone Scale A scale made up of whole tones Minimalism – 1950s + Minimalist Ideas repeated over and over Sounds very simple Changes happen gradually Aleatoric – 1950s Experimental John Cage “Music of Chance” Aleatoric Throwing dice to choose notes Performer’s choice to play music in order Choices made about tempo, dynamics and expression Performer improvises on a given group of notes No musical notation provided – symbols, a diagram, a drawing, a poem or basic idea Neo Classical Dissonance Instrumentation Unusual harmonic changes Serialism Devised by Schoenberg Arrangement of 12 notes of chromatic scale Tone row – None should appear out of order – A note may be immediately repeated – Any note may appear in any octave Tone Row Original form Retrograde (in reverse order) Inversion (turned upside down) Retrograde Inversion (backward and upside down) Musique Concrete Musique Concrete Recorded Natural Sounds Edited using techniques such as: – Cutting and re-assembling – Playing backwards – Slowing down – Speeding up Musical A play which has speaking, singing and dancing Performed on a stage. In recent years the musical has seen a revival and may now deal with very dramatic stories and contain no dialogue. Polytonality Two or more keys played or sung at the same time The melody might be in the key of C major whilst the accompaniment might be in E major Bartok Ives Holst Stravinsky Cross Rhythms The effect of two notes being played against three The effect that occurs when the accents in a piece of music are different from those suggested by the time signature – 4/4 time into 3+3+2 quavers Note Clusters A group of notes played on a keyboard instrument with the palm of the hand or even with the forearm Microtone Any interval noticeably smaller than a semitone Often found in the music of Eastern European countries and also in Indian and Arabic music Irregular Metres Groupings of notes change, but the underlying pulse remains constant. Groupings of two and three produce irregular accents and metres Destroy the feeling of a regular down beat by changing the time signature frequently Sprechgesang A technique used in vocal music Half-way between singing and speaking Hemiola A rhythmic device giving the impression of a piece of music changing from duple (2) to triple (3) time vice versa Sometimes placed at the end of a piece to act as a kind of Rallentando. .