20th Century Composers
The composers in this section all composed their music during the last century. Some of them are still composing today. Seems simple enough. But over the last 100 years, ideological changes and technical advances have affected not only the way that music is enjoyed but also the way that it is composed. These composers have all explored new and uncharted territory in terms of tone and structure, often abandoning -- or combining -- preconceived notions about the nature of classical music. Schoenberg developed the equally weighted twelve-tone scale, which abolished previously held ideas about tone. Debussy and Ravel experimented with Impressionism, which further destroyed traditional tonality. Gershwin incorporated elements of jazz into his wildly popular music. Cage's aleatoric compositions were based on chance ambient sounds. These composers combined instruments in unheard-of ways and wrote parts for familiar instruments, like the piano, to be played with entirely different techniques. Then, the invention of electronic instruments opened the door for even greater sonic exploration.
Together, these composers contributed to the demise of music as it had existed for over three hundred years. They forced people to listen to the world around them in an entirely new way. What could be more experimental than that?
