20th Century's Music

  • Earliest film music scores were produced

    A film by the Lumiere brothers included one of the earliest film music. During that time, the music wasn't recorded. Instead, the musicians played during the silence of the movie.
  • Federico Garcia Lorca was born

    Lorca was a playwright, poet, and theatre director who came from Spain. He protested Fascism with plays and works that contained anti-fascist ideologies. He expressed his own homosexuality and was unapologetic about bringing true human emotions and experiences into the theatre. Because of this, he was censored and later murdered by the people who hated him.
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    20th Century

    Moving into this century, much technological and music progress has been made that has been shaping society into something new. Music is even starting to be taught in more depth in universities. With films and movies starting to surface more, music was starting to profit off of different ways by being included in films. Overall, music is starting to grow alongside the new technology.
  • Olivier Messiaen was born

    Messiaen was a French composer who dabbled in surrealism. His songs focused on concepts from religion, even ones that were non-Western cultural.
  • John Cage was born

    John Cage helped create more modern techniques to music and described music as being "organized sound". He even experimented with the idea of music equaling silence by "composing" a piece that was silent the whole duration of it. The piece was performed multiple times and people referred to it as a joke, but Cage took it seriously. He thought all and any sound was music and his purpose as a composer was not to be shocking,
  • Louis Gottschalk writes music scores for the Oz Film Manufacturing Company

  • Actual Film Music Scores Were Written

    German expressionist musicians started writing sheet music and scores specifically for movies and films.
  • Pierre Boulez

    Boulez was a French composer who was deemed important to the progression of modern music. He was also a successful conductor and music theorist, winning awards like Grammies. Throughout the 1940's-70's, we started becoming more recognized for his composition. He experienced with surrealism and his works represented the obsession composers had with complexity during the mid-20th century. It sparked a desire for simplicity rather than complexity.
  • Karheinz Stockhausen was born

    Stockhausen was a German composer who tampered with electronic and contributing to the succession of it, he was an experimentalist.
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    The Golden Age of Films and Film Music

    The late 1930's were noted as the Golden age of Films and Film Music.
  • The Electric Guitar Was Invented

    A pick-up was used in an acoustic guitar by a Jazz artist named Charlie Christian.
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    Film Music wasn't performing as well as Concert Music

    The innovations being made for concert music were improving far more than the ones for films.
  • Musique Concrete Emerged

    This French musical style starting becoming popular in the late 1940's and was used more throughout the 1950's Musique Concrete was the use of sounds produced in natural ways and then later manipulated.
  • Sonatas and Interludes

    John Cage composed these works for piano. It included sixteen sonatas and four interludes. At the beginning of the score, instructions on performing it are written by Cage.
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    Improvement on Film Music

    Film music started including more Jazz at times and including works from more modern composers. Alex North wrote for the film "A Streetcar Named Desiree" in 1951 and Copland and Stravinsky started writing for films. There is even a whole list of Film Composers on Wikipedia!
  • The Technological Revolution

    Computers started to be used in music and tape recording started being used.
  • The Synthesizer Was Invented

    Although this new instrument was invented in the mid-1950's, it started becoming more popular and utilized in the 1980's.
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey

    Music composed by Gyorgy Ligeti was included in this Sci-fi film. Ligeti was known for his electronic music and complex choral music.
  • Ancient Voices of Children

    A work that consists of five five songs and two instrumental interludes. It was composed by George Crumb and inspired by the poems by Federico Garcia Lorca. George Crumb was also a teacher who retired in 1999. His compositions were not in the traditional genre and he composed classical music and modern madrigals. He was an activist and his works and poetry protested the Vietnam War.
  • MIDI

    Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) is a musical invention software that allows synthesizers to be able to connect to computer software.
  • Paul Lanksy was born

    Lanksy was a teacher, composer, theorist, and music critic born in the USA. He used synthesizers in his musical works and even composed a whole opera on computer software.