Characteristics of Romanticism and Preoccupation of the 20th Century - Essay Example

From a modern perspective, the decline of improvisation seems paradoxical, because modern listeners think of spontaneity as a characteristic of Romanticism. Improvisation is most often associated with jazz.

The preoccupation of The 20th century

The practicality of linking the art of composition, as opposed to that of performance to mechanical, electromechanical, or purely electronic machines, has been a mainly 20th-century preoccupation. The 20th century saw a crop of mechanical performers. The Revolution in Sound: electronic music/ (1960), Milton Babbitt writes: "All factors militate against the composition of complex contemporary music: the uncompensated time involved in its composition, the crushing costs of preparing materials, the inadequate number of rehearsals, and the consequent, unusually unsatisfactory, always ephemeral performance.

The electronic medium discriminates not at all against such complexity; rather, it is most appropriate to it. Such music can now remove itself entirely from the inapposite milieu of the public concert hall; it exists, in any case, only in recorded form, and is so available to anyone interested, to be played and replayed at the listener's convenience" As well as providing simple and reliable ways of recording and making music, electronic devices were soon to provide a completely new and rich sound world. Compositions that utilize the capacities of electronic media for creating and altering sounds may be called electronic music or electro-acoustic music.

Electronic Revolutions
The invention of electronic devices came before composers could exploit their unusual sound characteristics. The first significant instrument, the Theremin, was invented in 1920 by the Russian Leon Theremin (1896-1993) and manufactured by the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). It used interference beats from two oscillators to produce pure sine-wave notes. Australian composers Percy Grainger (1882-1961) and Bohuslav Martinu (1890-1959) both composed for the Theremin. The Ondes-Martinot, invented in 1928 by Maurice Martenot, and the Trautonium, invented in 1930 by Dr. Friedrich Trautwein, were of a similar design. Grainger and his wife Ella worked with Burnett Cross to produce 1948 their electronic instrument, the Free Music Machine, as part of Grainger's search for music free from traditional tonal and rhythmic constraints.

This work continued until 1960 when the Electric Eye Tone Tool appeared. It now forms part of the Percy Grainger Museum in Australia. The earliest electronic musical works used recorded sounds that were electronically altered. The invention 1940 of the tape recorder increased the possibilities for modifying recorded sounds, by cutting the tape to create new juxtapositions of sound (called splicing), varying the speed to change the pitch of the recorded sound, and mixing two or more different recordings which could then be played back simultaneously. Les Paul, a pioneer of electronic music, invented the first solid-body electric guitar in 1946 and recorded music in the 1950s in an eight-track recording studio that he designed. Pierre Schaeffer (1910), a sound technician working at Radio-diffusion-Television Francaise (RTF) in Paris, produced several short studies in what he called Musique concrete.

In October 1948, Schaeffer's early studies were broadcast in a "concert of noises". Possibly echoing the first concert of Futurist music in 1914 entitled "Art of noises", presented by Marinetti and Russolo in Milan, Italy. Schaeffer and Henry (1927-96), along with engineer Jacques Poulin composed /Symphonie pour un homme seal/ (Symphony for a Man Alone); the work premiered on March 18, 1950. A glance at any twentieth-century music textbook will give one the impression that serialism, chance music, electronic music, and the post-modern trends of minimalism and neo-romanticism have seemed to dominate the music of the second half of the twentieth century.

Conclusion

An observation into a more complete view of late twentieth-century music comes from looking at the influences on individual composers and thus gives the perspective that this music abounds with tradition. The explosion of resources that arose from musicological and ethnomusicological research fueled much of this rich sophistication in twentieth-century music. Only in the twentieth century have musicologists and other researchers successfully begun to construct a complete musical picture of such sources as the Medieval period, non-Western cultures, and the political and philosophical /zeitgeists/ of all of the many times and cultures. Music in the twentieth century, then, does not draw on one central and contemporary tradition to the exclusion of foreign influence, but, rather, makes use of many much more individualistic origins and inspirations as its "tradition". “This is well illustrated in the case, reported by Michael Ball, of the French composer and teacher Olivier Messiaen. Read More