Formal innovations in Twentieth-Century Music

Formal innovations in Twentieth-Century Music

Part I - New pitch Materials and Form
Claude Debussy is considered one of the founders of modern music.  His treatment of tonality and harmony.  He used many tertian¹ harmonies, but avoided cadences and progressions.  Debussy's approach to melody, harmony, rhythm, and texture resulted in new approaches to form.  Principals of repitition, contrast, variation, and restatement remained, but there was an absence of tonal syntax.

Part II - New pitch materials, Transposition, and Traditional form
Hungarian composer Bela Bartok drew from a wide range of styles, most notably folk songs. Dissonance² and chromaticism are among the most widely used techniques used in his music.  He often used the octatonic scale. here is an example of an octatonic scale:

Fig.1 octatonic scale on Eb.

With this new scale, it is difficult to build triads, so often quartal harmonies are used.  That is harmonies built on the interval of a fourth instead of a third.  This creates a distinct dissonant harmony in the piece.  Bartok's "Mikrocosomos" is a prime example of where he uses the octatonic scale as the basis of a piece.  

Part III - Atonality

Atonality is defined as the absence of a key.  Often, a tone row is used as a basis of the entire piece.  This is an example of a tone row:

 Fig.2 tone row

  Each of the chromatic notes are in every row.  No importance is given to duration of note, octave, or velocity. We will discuss how to generate a tone row and what each row means in more detail in the Theory lesson.

Part IV - Clusters and Textures
Most often in atonal music, instead of chords clusters are used.  a cluster is just that. a cluster of notes.  Clusters are notated like this:

Fig.3 note cluster

This notation means to play every single note between the outer two notes simultaneously.  This is a very common practice in the twentieth century. 

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1.  tertian (from Latin, meaning "of or concerning thirds") describes any piece. chord, counterpoint, etc. constructed from the interval of a (major or minor) third
2. Dissonance- Lack of harmony among musical notes.