09/11 9. Modernism and the Early Twentieth Century Free Online FlashCards

What was musical modernism?

Musical modernism was a broad search for new ways to organize pitch, rhythm, timbre, form, and musical meaning, rather than one unified style.

What defines musical Impressionism?

Impressionistic music emphasizes atmosphere, suggestion, sensory impression, orchestral color, and ambiguous harmony rather than dramatic development or goal-directed harmonic motion.

How do pentatonic and whole-tone scales differ?

A pentatonic scale uses five pitches; a whole-tone scale uses only whole steps and lacks the usual leading-tone pull toward a tonic.

How does Debussy depict the sea in La Mer?

In La Mer, Debussy evokes the sea through layered textures, shifting sonorities, unusual scales, and differentiated instrumental colors rather than literal musical imitation.

How does Ravel vary Boléro?

Ravel creates variety in Boléro through changing instrumentation, register, dynamics, and orchestral density while retaining the same basic melody and rhythm.

How did Bartók transform folk traditions?

Bartók combined folk-derived melodies, modal and pentatonic materials, irregular rhythms, asymmetrical phrases, dissonant counterpoint, and unusual instrumental combinations.

Why is Mahler considered a bridge to modernism?

Mahler stands between late Romanticism and modernism: he retains huge orchestras and emotional intensity while introducing fragmentation, irony, extreme contrasts, and weakened tonal stability.

What is atonality?

Atonality organizes music without a single traditional major-minor tonal center; it weakens or removes the usual hierarchy of tonic, dominant, and functional relationships.

What is Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method?

Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method uses an ordered row containing all twelve pitch classes, which may appear as the original, inversion, retrograde, or retrograde inversion.

Who belonged to the Second Viennese School?

Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern are called the Second Viennese School; Berg retained dramatic expressiveness, while Webern favored brief, transparent textures.

How did modernists expand the role of timbre?

Modernist composers treated timbre as a structural element by using extreme registers, unusual combinations, extended techniques, percussion, transparent textures, and abrupt contrasts.

What rhythmic features define The Rite of Spring?

The Rite of Spring emphasizes repeated ostinatos, shifting accents, irregular groupings, dense dissonant chords, and abrupt textural changes.