Post-Romanticism (1890-1930)

By gonzobear85

  • Mahler (1860-1911)

    Mahler was a maximalist composer. He made extremely crucial expansions to symphonies and lieder, which is poems turned into music.

  • Debussy (1862-1918)

    Debussy wrote the first modern orchestral piece of music. It was considered to be modern because all the chords didn't resolve, the tempo was extremely vague, the meter was also vague, and the orchestration was different than what was considered normal at the time.

  • Strauss (1864-1949)

    He was a very traditional conductor who composed non-traditional music. Strauss was a Maximalist when it came to his way of composing. He orchestrated huge pieces and pushed his music to the extremes with his use of chromaticism.

  • Schoenberg (1874-1951)

    Schoenberg was also an extremely famous composer that went atonal in circa 1907. He started to create "tone rows" which are atonal melodies.

  • Ravel (1876-1937)

    Ravel wrote the first impressionist piano piece.

  • Stravinsky (1882-1971)

    Stravinsky was an extremely famous composer. He did not have one specific style that he stuck to. His style changed a lot as he moved around the world and as time progressed.

  • General changes (1890-1930)

    Music during the post romantic era changed a lot as a whole. It became much more linear instead of being vertical or chord based. The strings were also not the main focus in this era. Brass and percussion were becoming just as important if not more important than strings. Jazz and ragtime was starting to influence this style a lot as well.

  • Impressionism (1890's-1920's)

    This was a genre that was mostly from the 1890's to the 1920's. This genre was based off of scales, pentatonic, whole tone, and more exotic scales to be exact. There were also lots of parallel chords and unresolved resonances. This music also included lots of 9th chords, which this was the first time ever hearing of this. Tone was one of the most important things in this style of music. There weren't too many dynamics, a strong meter, or heroic goal. It was the exact opposite of minimalism.

  • Expressionism (circa 1910)

    Expressionism was heavily based in Germany and Austria. This completely freed music from any tonality. It made the music completely atonal and made it have no progression rules at all. All notes were considered to have the same weight in this style of music.

  • World War 1 (1912-1918)

    The world wars heavily influenced all music styles in this time period and afterwards. After people returned to their country after the war, the music started to change drastically and created styles such as Expressionism.

  • Maximalism (1890's-1914)

    In minimalism, lots of traditional things changed. For example, there was extreme orchestration, extreme chromaticism, extreme textures, and extreme themes. As you can tell, this genre was very extreme. Lots of this music was written as polyphonic.

  • Rise of the Nazi Party (1925-1930)

    While the Nazi party started to grow after the 1st World War, Adolf Hitler began to ask composers to be writing music for them which. Considering how violent the Nazi party was, it makes sense how extreme the music began to get and almost violent with Maximalism.

  • The Great Depression (1929)

    The great depression began in 1929 and continued for 10 years after that until World War II started. While a vast majority of this time period is out of the Post-Romanticism era, it caused a big change in music and even helped transition into the following era of music.