From: Tako Oda
To: VOCALIST <vocalist>
Subject: Getting OFF: 20th century music
Send reply to: VOCALIST <vocalist>

"Christopher Dwyer" wrote:
> That having been said, My vote goes for expanding the Romantic era into the
> 20th century, probably up until 1975. After that, let's call it minimalist.
> Except for Luciano Berio. Let's call him Dadaist. :-P Then, parallel to the
> "Late Romantic" era, let's start "Expressionist" whenever Schoenberg decided
> to "Liberate the Dissonance"

Dear Christopher,

Neato, I like what you're saying! I think Schoenberg considered himself
a Romantic at heart. His 12 tone system was, in his opinion, simply a
technical extension of the work of Brahms and Wagner. I'd say
(musical) expressionism is a subset of Romanticism, since the whole idea
is, well, ahem, expression and all :)

I'd say non-linearity was the next big thing. Starting with Big Band
music and Webern, most composers started losing interest in "going
somewhere" with their compositions. Rather, the music was "just there".
Beginning with the Beatles, pieces even lost their endings, they simply
started to fade out. "Serious" composers also did not look at time the
same way anymore. We have discontinuities of Webern, the minimalism of
Glass, the temporal snapshots of Xenakis, the "time-machine" of
Oliveros. All these styles have their own names, but what they all have
in common is a sense of atemporality.

Tako Oda
Graduate Student in Composition
Mills College Music Department
http://www.mills.edu/PEOPLE/gr.pages/toda.public.html/music/singer.html