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Florence Price
Florence Price, born in Little Rock, Arkansas, was the first black female composer to have a symphony performed by a major American orchestra. She was active from the years 1889 until 1952 and was one of only 2000 students to pursue a double major at the New England Conservatory. Her career was influenced by racial discrimination as she had to pretend to be Mexican to avoid racism and moved to Chicago due to racial unrest in the South. -
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Nadia Boulanger
Nadia Boulanger was a major composer and teacher in the 20th century. She taught practically all major composers of the period, except for George Gerswhin, to find their own compositional voice. -
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Charles Ives
Charles Ives was one of the most innovative American composers of the 20th century. He was trained in untraditional ways by his father but he made his living in insurance. Most of his works were not published until the 1950s as he became disenchanted with music in America. His style contained Polytonality, Polyrhythms and Polymeters, Quotations of American tunes, and Limited Atonality. Many composers of the period admired his works and were influenced by them. -
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Sergei Prokofiev
Sergei Prokofiev was a major Russian composer who studied at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. Prokofiev composed a large collection of pieces, ranging from piano concertos to film scores. His major traits were Classicism, Individual Harmonic Language, Rhythmic Drive, Lyrical Expression, and Comedic Elements. -
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Film Music
Film Music represented a new way for composers to earn money. Rather than being a centerpiece, music was now used to support another artistic endeavor. It would originally be performed alongside the film but was eventually recorded over the movie's audio. -
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William Grant Still
William Grant Still was an African American composer and the first Black American composer to have a symphony and opera performed by a major American ensemble and to conduct a major symphony orchestra. He began his career in the 1920s arranging dance and jazz music and then moved to Los Angeles in the 1930s to compose film scores. He was a main factor in the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and helped to mold African American musical culture. -
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Henry Cowell
Henry Cowell was a musical innovator of the 20th century who taught John Cage. He was a huge supporter of Charles Ives and attempted to spread his music and techniques, such as the tone cluster which Cowell named. Cowell created new techniques for piano and attempted to emulate non-Western music. -
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Duke Ellington
Duke Ellington was a major influence on jazz and a bandleader in both the swing and big band eras. He composed an enormous volume of tunes that are still in use as standards today. -
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Aaron Copland
Aaron Copland was a prominent composer and teacher of the Post-1900s era. He taught at Harvard and gave a series of lectures that influenced future composers. A student of Boulanger, he composed a variety of different genres but did not produce a large amount of music. -
The Unanswered Question
The Unanswered Question was composed by Charles Ives in 1906 and later edited in the 1930s for chamber orchestra. The piece was not published until 1940 and utilizes a motif of a question, performed in an offstage trumpet part, and answered by a wind quartet. -
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Elliott Carter
Elliott Carter was an American composer and teacher with an equal amount of influence in both categories. After an early Neoclassical phase, Carter began to compose with a distinctive harmonic and rhythmic language, which he continued to use from then on. -
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Jazz
Jazz was a musical style that arose around 1916 with influences from African folk music and Western musical practices. Styles of jazz include scat singing, ragtime, swing, blues, and bebop. -
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Non-Tonal Music
Non-Tonal Music was a major musical style that influenced most composers of the time period. The style represented a change in compositional technique in which many composers began to included atonality into their music, regardless of genre. -
The Electric Guitar
The electric guitar was invented to be used in large ensemble settings to allow the instrument to pierce through a busier listening environment. It was initially used in jazz ensembles but later found use in rock and roll groups as well. -
Peter and the Wolf
Peter and the Wolf was a programmatic orchestral piece with a narrator composed by Sergei Prokofiev. Prokofiev wrote the piece as part of a commission to create music that would interest children. Different characters in the story are played with different instruments, such as Peter as the strings and the wolf as the french horn. -
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World War II
World War II was a global war between the Axis Powers (Italy, Germany, and Japan) and most of the rest of the world. The war spread musical styles such as jazz around the world and saw an increase in use of military bands. -
Appalachian Spring
Appalachian Spring was a ballet written by Aaron Copland for dancer Martha Graham. Copland composed with her style in mind and based it on early American pioneer celebrations. He later orchestrated the ballet to expand his reach to other markets. -
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The Cold War
The Cold War was a period of tension between the Soviet Union and the United States and its allies. No official war between the two broke out but a series of proxy wars occurred due to their spheres of influence. Music was written about the conflict mainly in the Rock and Roll Genre. -
Transistor Radio
The transistor radio was invented as an early portable radio device. Billions were sold between 1950 and 2010 and allowed for music to become much more popular and easier to access for the majority of people. -
"A Black Pierrot"
"A Black Pierrot" was an art song from William Grant Still's Songs of Separation. The concept of a Pierrot is similar to Petroushka in Stravinsky's music. The song was based on a poem of the same name by Langston Hughes. The song had chromatic harmony and blues influence as a product of the Harlem Renaissance. -
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Aleatory Music
Aleatory Music involves the use of chance, using random conditions to create music. John Cage was a major composer of the style and lead the way in the genre. -
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Indeterminate Music
Indeterminate Music was also based on elements of chance but had more distinctive structure. Only portions of the performance were left up to chance in this style. -
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Rock and Roll
Rock and Roll was developed as a style by musicians like Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley. The style was made to appeal to a teenage audience and was indicative of the decline of racism in America. -
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The Vietnam War
The Vietnam War, a proxy of the Cold War, involved a struggle by the Soviet Union and the US to spread influence over Vietnam. The Soviet Union supported Northern Vietnam while the United States supported Southern Vietnam. The conflict necessitated a military draft in the United States and sparked widespread protests. -
The Internet
The Internet's official start is considered 1983. It allowed for an ease of communication between long distances and eventually would allow music to be spread across the world as more and more people gained access to it in recent years.