The early 20th century USA, Latin America, and Africa - Essay Example

The early 20th century USA, Latin America, and Africa. Even though art is an autonomous language where artists get the opportunity to speak out their feelings to the audience, it is very unpredictable to tell what the performer intends to pass. The best way of understanding the society of the past is by looking at art, music as well as literature that it produced. The artistic styles are able to tell more about a period. The problem is that, art and music before the period of 20th century had dozens of different styles and movements, not just one or two that typify the century.

However, regardless of the style, there three distinctive trends that they had; there was a tendency to be less and less accessible to the average person, a tendency to glorify art itself as well as to undercut traditional standards and values. A period before the 20th century, music was pretty easy for the average person to understand because they followed common harmonic patters that one could find to frequently popular tunes. (Hoffer, Charles pg. 67)However in the 20th century, composers began to move away from these patters toward what is called atonal music, that which has a pattern not easy to recognize.

The century brought with it new freedom and wide experimentation with new musical styles and forms that challenged the accepted rules of early periods. Industrialization led to the inventions of electronic instruments and synthesizer that revolutionized popular music and speeded up the development of new form of music. A good case study is a Latin American music, which has a variety of styles that arrived in America and eventually become influential from the early Spanish and European Baroque to the different beats of the African rhythms.

( Gopal, Sarvepalli pg. 102)On the other hand, in visual arts too, the three tendencies could be seen; artists could combine a multiple of perspectives, looking at an object from different points of view and sometimes at different times. It was not easy for an average person to interpret a simple piece of art rather than simply appreciating the art’s use of color, line, composition, as well as the artist’s feelings. They were also influenced by the various movements that fought for the people’s rights and freedom.

Africans used various songs to mobilize their members against imperialisms; they also drew diagrams that could only be interpreted by them. But in the 20th century pieces of art have been used to give us, not unfamiliar images, but images that are as familiar as they can possibly be. People have been able to express their feelings in a more appropriate ways through the development and innovation of machines both in developing countries such as Africa as well as in the U.S. (Meyer, Leonard pg 74).

Work Cited.Gopal, Sarvepalli. The Twentieth Century. London: Routledge, 2008. Print.Hoffer, Charles R. Music Listening Today. Belmont, CA: Thomson/Schirmer, 2009. Print.Meyer, Leonard B. Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Patterns and Predictions in Twentieth-Century Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Internet resource.