20th c.

Impressionism & Expressionism

Twentieth-century composers pursued many different responses to nineteenth-century traditions. Debussy explored new colors and harmonic relationships, Schoenberg moved beyond conventional tonality, and Stravinsky reworked rhythm and older forms. World wars, migration, recording, and broadcasting changed how music was made and heard. Later developments included electronic music and minimalism; no single style represents the entire century.

Musical terms

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Key musical characteristics

Radically plural musical languages
New approaches to timbre, rhythm, and tonality
Recording changed listening and performance
Electronic and experimental practices emerged

Music theory concepts

Pitch-class set theory: Analyzing unordered pitch collections through interval content, normal order, and set class.
Twelve-tone technique: Ordering all twelve pitch classes into a row and transforming it through serial operations.
Modes and synthetic scales: Whole-tone, octatonic, pentatonic, and constructed collections used beyond functional tonality.
Quartal and quintal harmony: Chords built primarily from stacked fourths or fifths rather than thirds.
Polyrhythm and metric modulation: Layered pulses and proportional tempo relationships that reorganize musical time.

Famous composers

Writers and poets

Virginia Woolf
T. S. Eliot
James Baldwin
Pablo Neruda

Visual artists

Pablo Picasso
Wassily Kandinsky
Frida Kahlo
Georgia O’Keeffe

Key historical event

Two world wars and their aftermath transformed cultural institutions, migration, technology, and artistic expression.

Notable invention

Electronic recording and broadcasting made performances reproducible and globally distributable.