20th-century classical music

20th-century classical music is classical music written during the last century. During earlier periods of music history composers from different countries wrote in styles which were often quite similar. For example, composers in the Classical music period (about 1740-1820) had fairly similar ideas about what forms to use (e.g. sonata form), what instruments should be used in orchestras or how to write good tunes.

Classical music from the 20th century is extremely varied. There are lots of different “schools” (meaning: ways of thinking) as lots of composers had their own ideas about how to compose in ways that were different from what had been done before. A lot of these genres (types of music) had names ending in “ism”: there was serialism, Expressionism, Neoclassicism, Impressionism as well as jazz, world music (music from non-European cultures) and folksong and, later on electronic music and then Minimalism and even post-modernism.

The names of periods in history were usually given to them many years afterwards. For example, the term Middle Ages was not used until long after the Middle Ages had finished. It is difficult to know what to call the period we live in now. In music people often talk about “Modern Music” meaning any music written after 1900. We also talk about “Contemporary Music” meaning more or less the same thing (“contemporary” means “things that are happening in our time”, i.e. “living composers”). Now that the 21st century has started some musicians are starting to talk about “20th century music” (1900-2000) and a period called “Contemporary Music” (1975-today).

This article will discuss classical music written from 1900 to the year 1999.