Composer Profile - Activefolio

Summary
The Twentieth Century 131
The first composer whose music was considered minimalistic was Philip Glass
(1937–). Glass studied at Julliard and also in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. He also had a
keen interest in Indian sitar music, jazz, and the Beatles. His major works include the
opera Einstein on the Beach (1976), Glassworks (1983) and Satyagraha (1980).
Other composers in the minimalist style are Steve Reich (1936–) and John Adams
(1947–). Perhaps Reich’s best known composition is the five-movement suite City Life
(1995). This work uses a small chamber ensemble and two electronic samplers which
add sounds of the city including door slams, bus airbrakes, and car horns. Adams composed
his now-famous opera Nixon in China in 1987. His orchestra work Short Ride in
a Fast Machine (1986) is a wonderful hybrid of minimalism and electronic music.
Other Modern Trends
A myriad of other compositional directions were initiated in the twentieth century, some
were more successful than others. One style called total serialism took the serial techniques
of Schoenberg to an even greater extreme. All aspects of musical performance
including pitch, dynamics, duration and articulation were given numeric values and
treated the same as the tone rows of serial composers. Therefore, any event would be
pre-prescribed in all of those areas. Total serialism was extremely complex; its major
exponents were Pierre Boulez and Milton Babbitt (1916–).
Another trend by many modern composers involved the use of sounds by conventional
instruments but outside the chromatic scale. Composers used the term pitch
continuum to describe this technique. Krzysztof Penderecki (1933–) composed Threnody
for the Victims of Hiroshima (1960) for large string orchestra. Players were asked to
perform things like “highest pitch possible” or to move in quarter steps instead of a
chromatic scale. Gyorgy Ligeti (1923–) achieved a certain amount of fame when some
of his music was used in the science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Atmospheres
(1961) used a fairly large orchestra playing all notes of a chromatic scale through several
octaves simultaneously. The piece evolves and textures change as instruments selectively
drop out and rejoin.
It is important to remember that many composers within the twentieth century wrote in
more than one style. The examples and the styles above tell only part of the story;
composers and musicians in the twentieth century were constantly searching for new
sonorities and new means of expression. Certainly part of this attitude was based on a
frustration with nineteenth century romanticism, but equally important was the simple
fact that the twentieth century presented many unique opportunities for musicians.
Technological advancements including tape sampling, computers and synthesizers gave
musicians an arsenal of sounds and capabilities that early composers could not have
imagined. The language of music had expanded well beyond the bounds explored by
Mahler and Wagner. Add to this the world of commercial music, growing at the same
time as the styles mentioned above, and one can realize that musical art had achieved a
new place in our society. Music had become infused into our work, our social life and
our personal lives.
Again, the styles described above can be roughly placed into the five categories
at the beginning of the chapter (Impressionism, Expressionism, Neo-Classicism, Neo-
Romanticism and Modern).