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Wilhelm Richard Wagner
Wagner was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is known for his operas. His compositions are notable for their complex textures, rich harmonies & orchestration, elaborate use of leitmotifs. His advances in musical language, like extreme chromaticism & quickly shifting tonal centres, greatly influenced the development of classical music. His Tristan und Isolde is sometimes described as marking the start of modern music. -
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Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
He was a Russian composer of the Romantic period. He was the first Russian composer whose music would make a lasting impression internationally. He was honored in 1884 by Tsar Alexander III and awarded a lifetime pension. Sometimes he used Western-style melodies, sometimes original melodies written in the style of Russian folk song; sometimes he used actual folk songs -
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John Philip Sousa
He was a bandmaster, known for multiple marches. Some of his famous works are: "The Washington Post" (1889), "Semper Fidelis" (1888), "Stars and Stripes Forever" (1897), and "El Capitan" (1896). -
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Giacomo Puccini
He was an Italian composer known primarily for his operas. Though his early work was firmly rooted in traditional late-19th-century Romantic Italian opera he later developed his work in the realistic verismo style, of which he became one of the leading exponents.
His most renowned works are La bohème (1896), Tosca (1900), Madama Butterfly (1904), and Turandot (1924), all of which are among the most frequently performed and recorded of all operas. -
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Gustav Mahler
Mahler was an Austrian Composer that focused on creating Lieder, symphonies, 5 orchestral song cycles, and chamber music. He also utilized aspects of non-western cultures. Two famous pieces include 'Symphony no. 5' and 'Des Knaben Wunderhorn'. -
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Hugo Wolf
Wolf was a German composer who mostly wrote Lieder. He brought these german lied to its "highest point in development". He was said to be half insane most of his life and was brought to an asylum near the end of it. He was admitted because he broke into a famous opera singer's house and demanded they sing for him. -
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Isaac Albéniz
Albéniz was a Post-Romantic Spanish pianist, composer, and conductor. He heavily influenced his contemporaries and was most famous for "Iberia"(1908), a suite of twelve piano "impressions". -
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Gustave Charpentier
A french composer widely know for his operas, especially "Louise" -
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Edward MacDowell
American composer,he is renowned for his piano suits and concerti; MacDowell's works include his most popular short piece, "To a Wild Rose" -
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Claude Debussy
Debussy was a French composer that was considered the "Father of Impressionism". He specialized in ballads and was considered "modern" due to vague tempos and meters, along with chords that did not resolve found in his works. The Orchestration was also considered different at the time. Famous works: Prélude a “L’apres-midi d’un faune” “Prelude to ‘The Afternoon of a Faun’” (1894) -
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Frederick Delius
Originally Fritz Delius, was an English composer.
Delius is famous for a large number of evocative vocal and orchestral works taking nature and landscape as their inspiration, for example Sea Drift, the Florida Suite, Appalachia and On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring. However, Delius wrote music in a wide variety of genres, including chamber music, song and opera. -
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Pietro Mascagni
Italian composer and conductor that became the official composer of the Fascist regime in the 1930's. He composed operas, songs, other vocal and instrumental works.However, he was primarily known for his operas. His 1890 masterpiece Cavalleria rusticana caused one of the greatest sensations in opera history and single-handedly ushered in the Verismo movement in Italian dramatic music. -
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Richard Strauss
Strauss was a German composer, violinist, pianist, and conductor. He conducted in a Maximalistic style and orchestrated huge pieces that pushed his music to the extremes with his use of chromaticism. The Maximalist characteristics in his work include huge orchestrations, extremes in harmonic chromaticism, and an excessive amount of motives (often polyphonically). Popular pieces include 'Salome' (1905), 'RosenKavalieu', 'Elektra' (1909) and "Thus Spake Zauathustua". -
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Paul Abraham Dukas
He was a French composer, critic, scholar, & teacher. He was intensely self-critical, having abandoned and destroyed many of his compositions. His best-known work is the orchestral piece The Sorcerer's Apprentice (L'apprenti sorcier). Among these are the opera Ariane et Barbe-Bleue, his Symphony in C and Piano Sonata in E-flat minor, the Variations, Interlude and Finale on a Theme by Rameau (for solo piano), and a ballet, La Péri. -
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Carl Nielsen
Danish composer who was important to the history of Scandinavian music. He composed symphonies, operas, piano works, concertos, chamber music, and songs. Nielsen is especially noted for his six symphonies, his Wind Quintet, and his concertos for violin, flute, and clarinet. In Denmark, his opera Maskarade and many of his songs have become an integral part of the national heritage. -
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Paul Dukas
Italian composer; known for his program music from The Sorcerer's Apprentice -
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Jean Sibelius
Finlandian composer; composer of seven symphonies and the Violin Concerto in D minor, he waas also known for his symphonic poems including Lemminkäinen, En saga, and Finlandia. -
Musical Theater
Musical theater (some say musical comedy as the genre) has its roots in European operetta and French opérette -
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Ferruccio Busoni
He was an Italian composer, pianist, conductor, editor, writer, and teacher. His international career and reputation led him to work closely with many of the leading musicians, artists and literary figures of his time. He advocated moving on from the "tyranny of major and minor keys". However, his music sounded more conservative. He composed 6 stage works, vocal-orchestral works, piano works, songs, orchestral works, chamber music, and writings. -
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Erik Satie
Satie was not an impressionist, but was a leader in new French aesthetics that impressionism was built on. This incredible innovator created dramatic works, piano works, songs, and writings.
Satie's importance lay in "directing a new generation of French composers away from Wagner‐influenced impressionism towards a leaner, more epigrammatic style" -
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Amy Beach
Amy Marcy Cheney Beach was an
American composer and pianist that was very successful in Europe. She had a conservative style and wrote scholarly articles. She composed 1 opera, vocal-orchestral works, keyboard works, choral works, chamber music, and 130 songs -
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Scott Joplin
Scott Joplin was an African-American composer and pianist. Joplin is also known as the "King of Ragtime" because of the fame achieved for his ragtime compositions. -
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Aleksandr Skryabin
Russian composer that was influenced by chromaticism and impressionism. This virtuoso pianist composed tone poems, piano works, symphonies, and writings. -
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Max Reger
German composer who was a master of counterpoint. He created choral music, symphonic poems, piano works, chamber music, editions, and writings. -
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Arnold Schoenburg
He is known for his formulation of the 12 tone system compositions, writing the first "atonal" piece. Each of the 12 pitches are organized into "rows" and manipulated to form a very systematic technique for composing. He had stated in his life that he had composed a song cycle that had "broken the bonds of bygone aesthetic". Popular pieces include "Variations for Orchestra" and " Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten". -
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Gustav Holst
English composer that was influenced by folksong and Hindu mysticism. He created orchestral works, choral and chamber works, songs, and stage works. -
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Charles Ives
He was one of the most innovative & original composers as well as
one of the great American composers of the first half of the 20th century. His father shaped his style. Most of his works were not known until the 1950s. He made his living in insurance (Ives & Myrick). He's famous for noting that if an American composer wanted to be successful in America, he had to go to Europe first and prove himself there. His style includes: Polytonality, Polyrhythms, Polymeters, &Limited atonality -
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Maurice Ravel
Ravel was a French Impressionist composer. that has created operas, ballets, vocal, orchestral, and piano works. He is credited for writing the first impressionist piano piece. Famous works include "Boléro" and "Daphnis et Chloé". -
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Mykola Leontovych
Ukranian teacher, composer, and conductor who is known for composing the music to the popular Christmas carol "Carol of the Bells." -
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Alma Mahler
Austrian composer, author, editor, and wife of another Post-Romantic composer, Gustav Mahler. She composed mainly works for voice and piano. -
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Bela Bartok
He is known as a composer with an ethnic mix on classical works. He traveled significantly in his 20's throughout the Hungarian and Romanian countryside, collecting and recording melodies throughout that time, which were later released as composition. Popular pieces include "Duke Bluebeard's Castle", "Miraculous Mandarin', and "Cantata Profana". -
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Igor Stravinsky
Stravinksy is one of the more famous composers that did not stick to one style of music. He wrote multiple styles and went through the
periods: Russian, French, Neoclassical, and Serialist. His parents forbade him to pursue a musical career so he studied law in St. Petersburg and graduated in 1905.
In 1902, his father died and Stravinsky studied privately with Rimsky-Korsakov for 3 years. His overall style: Ostinati, Harsh, rhythmically complex, & almost tonal with sharp dissonance. -
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R. (Robert) Nathaniel Dett
He was a pianist that Graduated from Oberlin and the Eastman School of Music. He studied with Natalie Boulanger and at Harvard and Columbia. He also helped found the National Association of Negro Musicians (1919) -
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Luigi Russolo
He was an Italian Futurist painter, composer, and builder of experimental musical instruments who wrote a creed or manifesto titled “The Art of Noises” (1913).He designed and constructed a number of noise-generating devices called "Intonarumori". -
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Nadia Boulanger
Taught practically all 20th Century American composers except George Gershwin, whom she refused to let in her class.
Composer, but preferred to help other composers find their “voice.” -
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Nadia Boulanger
An important teacher that taught the most prominent American composers of the first half of the 20th century. She was a conductor and composer. -
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Florence Price
She was born in Little Rock, AK Died in Chicago, IL.
She was the first black female composer to have a symphony performed by a major American orchestra: Symphony No. 1 in E minor. At four years old, she played in her first piano recital and her first composition was published at eleven years old.
She graduated HS at 14 as valedictorian.
She presented herself as Mexican to avoid discrimination. -
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Louis Durey
A communist that is not talked about much in music history. However, he composed stage works, chamber music, piano works, orchestral works, and film scores. He was also part of Les Six -
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Jean Cocteau
Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was a French poet, playwrite, novelist, designer, filmmaker, visual artist and critic. He was one of the foremost creatives of the surrealist, avant-garde, and Dadaist movements; and one of the most influential figures in early 20th-century art as a whole. -
Ragtime
Considered a precursor to jazz (1890s).
A music style originally developed from an African-American piano style characterized by highly syncopated rhythms and sectional forms.
Scott Joplin: Considered the “king of ragtime” – the first African-American composer to win international fame -
Blues
An American genre of folk music based on a simple, repetitive, poetic-musical form. The Form is: 3-line text strophes set to a repeating harmonic pattern of 12 (or 16) bars. It has a 12-Bar Blues Progression:
I, IV, I, V, IV, I.
The Blues genres are: City blues, Vaudeville blues, Country blues, Delta blues, and Downhome blues. -
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Maximalism
Many traditional aspects of music changed. For example, there was extreme orchestration, extreme chromaticism, extreme textures, and extreme themes. As you can tell, this genre was very extreme. A significant amount of this music was written as polyphonic. More is more -
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Individualism
Individualism was one of the most prominent traits in the Post-Romantic era of music, emphasizing the principle of being unique and relatable to the human experience of self-reliance. Debussy popularly used this technique by creating songs based on poetry. -
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Melody in this Era
Changes of melody during this era focused on chromatic, whole-tone scales. Many composers decided to turn away from western scales by emphasizing on the importance of either traditional form or harmony. -
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Harmony in this Era
The harmony in this era primarily focused on weak tonal centers, adding chromaticism and free treatment of dissonance. -
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Rhythm in this Era
The rhythm would heavily emphasize a "floating rhythm" (it lacked a sense of meter to better accentuate the feeling of unpredictable nature and individualism). The pulse could also be obsessive and homophonic. -
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Typical Genres in this Era
The genres in this era focused intensely on the rise of the symphony and opera. Homophonic (solo song paired w/ orchestra) melodies were often paired with symphonic poems for pieces, single instrument preludes, and introductions to larger pieces were also common during this era. -
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Naturalism+Realism
During the Post-Romantic era, composers wrote their music with the idea of naturalism and realism. These styles of music attempted to focus on nature's beauty, the reality of human experience, and the sound of "skimming colors" and light. Their primary goal was to portray nature through music. -
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Impressionism, Expressionism, and Neo-Classicism
Impressionism, Expressionism, and Neo-Classicism were a huge influence of post-romantic songs. Impressionism focused on the "vagueness" of a piece, while expressionism focused on the expression of the inner self, especially the subconscious. Neo-Classicism was the return of 18th-century ideals while retaining modern techniques of harmony, tonality, and melody. -
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Impressionism
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. -
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Overall Changes in Music
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. -
Carnegie Hall
This famous performance hall is named after Andrew Carnegie, one of the biggest names in American industrialization and the steel industry. One of the richest people in America at the time, he funded the construction of this hall, and it was opened in 1891. -
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Sergei Prokofiev
He was a Russian composer: orchestral pieces, piano works and film music. A famous work is “Peter and the Wolf” (1936). -
The Nutcracker
Tchaikovsky's 'The Nutcracker' is performed for the first time as a ballet at Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersberg, Russia. 1892 two-act ballet (originally choreographed by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov with a score by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (Op. 71). The libretto is adapted from E. T. A. Hoffmann's 1816 short story "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King". Tchaikovsky's score has become one of his most famous compositions. -
Sudrophone Invented
It is a brass instrument invented by the French instrument maker François Sudre (1844–1912). Its shape resembles that of an ophicleide and was patented in 1892. The unique feature of these instruments was a "mirliton" (kazoo), with a piece that would vibrate sympathetically with its pitch, creating a kazoo-like effect. This piece allowed the player to engage or disengage the membrane, so it could also function as a normal saxhorn, albeit with a unique outside shape and narrow bell. -
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Darius Milhaud
He is noted for his stage works, in which he wrote 15 operas, 13 ballets, and numerous pieces for French composer, conductor, and teacher. He was a member of Les Six—also known as The Group of Six—and one of the most prolific composers of the 20th century. His compositions are influenced by jazz and Brazilian music and make extensive use of polytonality. Milhaud is considered one of the key modernist composers. Popular pieces include 'Suite Provencale' and 'Sumare'. -
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Arthur Honegger
He was a Swiss composer who was a member of Les Six, his best known work is probably Antigone, composed between 1924 and 1927 to the French libretto by Jean Cocteau based on the tragedy Antigone by Sophocles. It premiered on 28 December 1927 at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie with sets designed by Pablo Picasso and costumes by Coco Chanel. However, his most frequently performed work is probably the orchestral work Pacific 231, which was inspired by the sound of a steam locomotive. -
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Darius Milhaud
He was a French composer, conductor, and teacher. He was a member of Les Six—also known as The Group of Six—and one of the most prolific composers of the 20th century. His compositions are influenced by jazz and Brazilian music and make extensive use of polytonality. Milhaud is considered one of the key modernist composers. -
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Germaine Tailleferre
Born Marcelle Germaine Taillefesse, she was a French composer and the only female member of the group of composers known as Les Six. Works in Brief
Tailleferre's chamber music is the best-known part of her corpus of works, including pieces for piano, violin, clarinet, and harp, but she also produced orchestral suites and overtures, several concertos, and a number of vocal works with various accompaniment. -
L’apres-midi d’un faune
Prelude to ‘The Afternoon of a Faun’ was a tone poem (symphonic poem) based on Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem. It was in a Free ternary form (ABA’) in which the flute represents the faun (half-goat, half-man). One of the goals was to avoid the Germanic heroic type of music. This is a piece in which you can hear the vague tempo and key. -
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Gebrauchmusik
Gebrauchmusik is the utility of music, which describes how it is written for special purposes. This closes the gap between composer and audience by giving the audience an inside look into the experience of the composer when they wrote this piece. It is also called utility music, music intended, by virtue of its simplicity of technique and style, primarily for performance by the talented amateur rather than the virtuoso. Paul Hindemith coined the term. -
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Radio Gains Popularity
Guglielmo Marconi proved the feasibility of the radio connection, later leading to mass communication of music through radios, tape recordings, and photographs. This made music largely accessible to vast amounts of the population. -
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Ragtime
This style of music earned its name by the "ragged" or syncopated rhythms it utilized. Typically, it was composed for piano and used a syncopated right hand melody with a straight, steady left hand accompaniment. The introduction of this movement sparked piano sales and became a trend in America. -
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Willliam Grant Still
He was the first Black American composer to have a symphony and opera performed by a major ensemble (1931, 1949)
as well as the first Black American to conduct a major symphony orchestra in 1936. He studied music at the New England Conservatory and Oberlin Conservatory. Many of his works had a style that blended African American idioms (ex.spirituals+blues) into more traditional European genres (ex. symphonies/operas/ballets). Note: "The Harlem Renaissance" (1923) and "Black Pierrot" (1949) -
Telharmonium (Dynamophone) Invented
It was an early electrical organ, developed by Thaddeus Cahill c. 1896 and patented in 1897. The electrical signal from the Telharmonium was transmitted over wires and was heard on the receiving end by means of "horn" speakers
Like the later Hammond organ, the Telharmonium used tonewheels to generate musical sounds as electrical signals by additive synthesis. It is considered to be the first electromechanical musical instrument. -
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Henry Cowell
He was John Cage’s teacher. He was an American innovator who was drawn to non-Western music. He was also a huge supporter of Charles Ives. He was known to invent chance music and new techniques for playing the piano. Cowell coined the term "tone cluster"-(1912) Groups of adjacent notes that were sounded with the fist/palm/forearm: Highly dissonant
Charles Ives used these chorally before 1900, but did not name them. One of Cowell’s most ground breaking pieces was “The Tides of Manaunaun” (1912) -
Telegraphone Invented
Valdemar Poulsen (23 November 1869 – 23 July 1942) was a Danish engineer who made significant contributions to early radio technology. He developed a magnetic wire recorder called the telegraphone in 1898 and the first continuous-wave radio transmitter, the Poulsen arc transmitter, in 1903, which was used in some of the first broadcasting stations until the early 1920s. -
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George Gershwin
He was an American composer: wrote classical, concert hall music infused with jazz and popular music who was also a virtuoso pianist. He also wrote Porgy and Bess (1935) -
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Duke Ellington
His real name is Edward Kennedy Ellington and he was a major band leader in the swing era (1930s) and then in the big band era (1940s). He composed hundreds of tunes, film scores, concertos, concert pieces, and works for the theater. He was most famous for his jazz tunes. -
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Georges Auric
He was a French composer who was considered one of Les Six, a group of artists informally associated with Jean Cocteau and Erik Satie. Before he turned 20 he had orchestrated and written incidental music for several ballets and stage productions. He also had a long and distinguished career as a film composer. -
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Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc
He was a French composer and pianist. His compositions include songs, solo piano works, chamber music, choral pieces, operas, ballets, and orchestral concert music. Among the best-known are the piano suite Trois mouvements perpétuels (1919), the ballet Les biches (1923), the Concert champêtre (1928) for harpsichord and orchestra, the Organ Concerto (1938), the opera Dialogues des Carmélites (1957), and the Gloria (1959) for soprano, choir and orchestra. Member of Les Six. -
Un Fin de siècle (1900s)
Composers began to react stylistically against the romantic style and its aesthetic
Some of these composers include Brahms, Schumann, Chopin, Wagner, and Dvorak.
Examples:
Dvorak - Symphony no. 9 - 4th movement - Allegro con fuoco
Wagner Opening to Act III Die Walküre
Chopin Etude Op.10 No.12 (Revolutionary) -
Pianola (Player piano) Invened
It is a self-playing piano, containing a pneumatic or electro-mechanical mechanism that operates the piano action via programmed music recorded on perforated paper, or in rare instances, metallic rolls, with more modern implementations using MIDI. The rise of the player piano grew with the rise of the mass-produced piano for the home in the late 19th C. sales peaked in 1924. the stock market crash of 1929 virtually wiped out production. -
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Aaron Copland
He was a composer, teacher, critic, conductor, and sponsor of concerts. He taught at Harvard, gave lectures (TED-style talks), and conducted festivals in many American schools. Copland’s style is mostly tonal. He did write atonal music, but it is not the popular part of his output. His style was also vigorous, clean and transparent, and filled with folk songs and folk idioms. It often had mixed meters (rhythmic) and comprised of as “few notes as possible” open intervals & solos (often exposed) -
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Undisguised Avant-Garde Style
A style of music which Erik Satie and Gabriel Fauré used. It was characterized by music opposing Romantic style in an attempt to differ from the norm. -
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Louis Armstrong
Often called the most influential figure in the rise of American Jazz, Armstrong was an American trumpeter, composer, vocalist, and actor, whose career began in the 1920s and spanned almost 5 decades. Popular pieces include "What a Wonderful World" and "Dream a Little Dream of Me". -
Dolceola Invented
A dolceola is a musical instrument resembling a miniature piano, but which is in fact a zither with a keyboard. It has an unusual, angelic, music-box sound. Dolceolas were made by the Toledo Symphony Company from 1903 to 1907. The gospel and gospel blues musician Washington Phillips (1880–1954) has been said to have played a dolceola on his recordings, but his instrument was in fact called a "dulceola", and was a home-made fingered fretless zither. -
Hecklephone Invented
The heckelphone (German: Heckelphon) is a musical instrument invented by Wilhelm Heckel and his sons. The idea to create the instrument was initiated by Richard Wagner, who suggested it at the occasion of a visit of Wilhelm Heckel in 1879. Introduced in 1904, it is similar to the oboe but, like the bass oboe, pitched an octave lower, the heckelphone having a significantly larger bore. -
Movie Theaters Begin
The first movie theater opens on June 19, 1905, in Pittsburgh, Penn. Thus begins the rise of cinematic scoring. -
Triode Invented
An electronic amplifying vacuum tube/valve consisting three electrodes inside an evacuated glass envelope: a heated filament/ cathode, a grid, & a plate/anode. Developed from Lee De Forest's 1906 Audion,it was the first practical electronic amplifier. Its invention founded the electronics age, making possible amplified radio technology and long-distance telephony. Triodes were widely used in consumer electronics devices such as radios & televisions until the 1970s when transistors replaced them. -
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Elliot Carter
An American composer; influential as a teacher and as a composer for 50 years. -
Orphéal Invented
The Orphéal was a keyboard instrument invented by the Belgian Georges Cloetens in 1910. It appears to have been a combination of piano, organ and harmonium, capable of reproducing approximations of the sounds of the cello, horn, etc. -
Expressionism
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. -
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Primitiivism
This Western movement was characterized by a use of ideas and themes that were not Western as subjects for art. Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" is an example of this style of composition. -
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Neo-Classicism
This movement was characterized by a return to ideas and styles from the Baroque and Classical eras. The ideas were kickstarted with a revival of Bach's music and Stravinsky's "Octet for Winds." -
Scat
Scat is the improvisational singing of nonsense syllables in music. Although the origins are unclear Louis Armstrong is known for "Heebie Jeebies" (1926) and is often cited as the first modern song to employ scatting. However, Entertainer Al Jolson scatted through a few bars in the middle of his 1911 recording of "That Haunting Melody." -
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World War 1
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. This famous war featured two groups: the Central Powers, which consisted of Germany, Austria, and their allies, and the Allied Powers, which consisted of Great Britain, Russia, Italy, France, and their allies. -
"The Rite of Spring"
A ballet with music written by Stravinsky and choreography by Vaslar Nijinsky. It was produced by Sergey Diaghilev and the costumes were inspired by Picasso. It premiered May 29, 1913 and had caused a riot on this night due to paid laughers in the audience. -
The Stoessel lute (German: Stössel-Laute)
It's a string instrument invented by Georg Stössel in Cologne (Köln), Germany. Its steel strings are fingered not by putting one's hand round the neck, but over the end of it. It's a hybrid between a necked string instrument and a zither.
It was very popular in Germany & elsewhere in the early 20th century, frequently used in German and Austrian schools in the inter-war period. The Second World War put an end to production and the instrument never regained its former popularity. -
Archduke Franz Ferdinand Assassinated
Archduke Franz Ferdinand is assassinated in Sarajevo, Austria on June 28th, 1914, triggering a chain of events that leads to the first World War. -
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Billie Holiday
Billie Holiday was one of the leading female jazz singers.
She broke racial barriers by performing with white bands and is
Known for her renditions of blues songs. -
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Billy StrayHorn
Strayhorn composed A Train
Strayhorn and Ellington collaborated on songs for many years. -
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Dadaism
Dadaism was a movement in which artists opposed war in Europe. They accomplished this by creating art that incited nonsense or anti-art ideas instead of the current societal standard. -
Optophonic Piano
An electronic optical instrument created by the Russian Futurist painter Vladimir Baranoff Rossiné. Rossiné started working on the instrument in 1916. The Optophonic Piano generated sounds and projected revolving patterns onto a wall or ceiling by directing a bright light through a series of revolving painted glass disks (painted by Vladimir Baranoff Rossiné himself), filters, mirrors, and lenses. The keyboard controlled the combination of the various filters and disks. -
Banjo Ukulele Invented
AKA: banjolele/banjo uke, is a four-stringed musical instrument with a small banjo-type body & a fretted ukulele neck. The earliest known banjoleles were built by John A. Bolander[1] and by Alvin D. Keech, both in 1917.
The instrument peaked in popularity in the 1920s & 1930s,& combines the small scale, tuning, & playing style of a ukulele w/ the construction & tone of a banjo. -
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Leonard Bernstein
He was a Conductor, Composer, Teacher, Pianist, Lecturer, and TV personality. He created West Side Story which had complex music. He was also notoriously Bi! A win for the girls, gays, and theys -
Jazz
Jazz is hailed as one of the greatest original American artforms. Jazz originated in African-American communities throughout the late 19th century, specifically in New Orleans, LA. Popular forms of jazz created during this time include Ragtime, which attends prominence of syncopation in various patterns, and Blues, in which the subject matter usually deals with an atmosphere of self-pity, loss or heartbreak, and can be performed arranged or improvised. -
19th Amendment Passed
The Senate debated what came to be known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment periodically for more than four decades. Approved by the Senate on June 4, 1919, and ratified in August 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment marked one stage in women's long fight for political equality -
Walt Disney Studios
Walt Disney Company is formed in 1923 in a small office in Los Angeles, CA. The company later turns into a massive monopoly and creates the first animated film. -
Cousenephone Invented
AKA: the goofus or queenophone, is a free-reed musical instrument resembling a saxophone harmonicor. Its reeds vibrate when the desired keys are activated & the player blows through a tube. It sounded like a cross between a harmonica and an accordion. However, the couesnophone is a polyphonic instrument, while the saxophone is monophonic. -
Rise of the Nazi Party
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. -
Croix Sonore Invented
An early electronic musical instrument with continuous pitch. It was developed by Russian-born composer Nikolai Obukhov and built by Michel Billaudot and Pierre Dauvillier in Paris. They developed a prototype version in 1926 & demonstrated an improved version in 1934. Obukhov composed several pieces for the Croix Sonore, in duet with piano, solo piece, and in an orchestra. The Croix Sonore was played by Marie-Antoinette Aussenac-Broglie, who was a student of Obukhov's. -
Electronic Organ Invented
The first successful electronic organ was developed in 1928 in France by Edouard Coupleux and Armand Givelet. It used electronic oscillators in place of the pipes of a conventional organ and was operated with keyboards and a pedal board. -
Theremin (ætherphone/etherphone/thereminophone/termenvox/thereminvox) Invented
It is an electronic musical instrument controlled without physical contact by the thereminist (performer). It is named after its inventor, Leon Theremin, who patented the device in 1928.
The instrument's controlling section usually consists of two metal antennas that sense the relative position of the thereminist's hands and control oscillators for frequency with one hand, and amplitude (volume) with the other. -
The Great Depression
It began in 1929 and continued for 10 years 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. -
Black Thursday
Panicked investors send the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunging 11 percent at the open in very heavy volume, beginning the Stock Market Crash that later causes the Great Depression. -
Tone Cluster
It is a musical chord comprising at least three adjacent tones in a scale. Prototypical tone clusters are based on the chromatic scale and are separated by semitones.The early years of the twentieth century saw tone clusters elevated to central roles in pioneering works by ragtime artists Jelly Roll Morton and Scott Joplin.In most Western music, tone clusters tend to be heard as dissonant. -
Vinyl Players Invented
"RCA-Victor (RCA had by then purchased the Victor brand) made the first 33 1/3-friendly vinyl long-players commercially available. Whether because of subpar sound, the Depression rendering them unaffordable or RCA-Victor marketing them drolly as Program Transcriptions, few folks took these early LPs for a spin. Nearly two decades later, in 1948, Columbia Records reintroduced their take on the format, and a revolution − not to mention fierce competition with RCA − was born. " -
Period: to
1930-2022
This serves as a divider -
JTM45 AMP invented
When Jim Marshall and his colleagues Ken Bran and Dudley Craven began constructing their now-signature amp, they had bass playback in mind and created it. -
Porgy and Bess
Gershwin said he wrote it to be an American folk opera. Dubose Heyward, a writer from Charleston, South Carolina, wrote a story called Porgy. This was the First opera with an "all-black" cast -
AEG Magnetophon Tape Recorder invented
German electronics-engineering company AEG (Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft) unveiled the first reel-to-reel tape recorder for everyday use. The Magnetophon was designed with Pfleumer's magnetic tape in mind . As with most original iterations of these devices, Magnetophon's first recordings were distorted and nearly inscrutable. But by 1939, tape manufacturers began using a different kind of oxide that provided extra clarity. -
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The Swing Era
The highly improvisational style of New Orleans jazz led, in the 1930s, to the swing or big band era.
Duke Ellington was a famous composer for this era. -
Peter and the Wolf, Opus 67
Russian: Петя и волк, Petya i volk
Programmatic orchestral piece
A commission to create music that would help cultivate musical taste in young children. Five musical traits of this show was:
Classicism (neo-classicism), Individual harmonic language, Rhythmic drive, Lyrical expression, and Comedic elements. -
First Electric Guitar Invented
It was around 1936 when a jazz guitarist named Charlie Christian (1916-1942) began using an acoustic guitar with a pickup attached to the body, with the intention of playing guitar solos in his band. This is said to be the birth of the electric guitar. -
Bell Labs Two-Channel Stereo (1937)
Bell Labs used a 1937 demonstration film to show off their two-channel innovation, which split up multiple tracks from a single source recording. The primary intent was to optimize movie soundtracks and enhance the theatrical experience, in a sense opening up another cinematic dimension. Only three years later, Disney seized on the technology and released Fantasia, the first commercial studio film amplified by high-fidelity stereo sound. -
Bebop Music
Bebop has roots in swing music and involves fast tempos, adventurous improvisation, dissonant solos, complex harmonies and chord progressions, and a focus on individual virtuosity.
The new “cool” jazz (late 1940s) -
The Vocoder
Before Auto-Tune, the Vocoder reigned as our primary tool for manipulating and messing with a singer's pitch (i.e. a vocal synthesizer). Created by a Bell Labs physicist to secure compressed voice transmissions over phone lines, it became essential during WWII in obscuring trans-Atlantic conversations between President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. -
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Americana Style Music
Americana style consists of musical quotations such as bits of American tunes, famous marches, children’s songs, folk music, or hymns. However, the style continues to grow as more genres pop up. They emerged from different cultural and geographical backgrounds. Although fairly contemporary, this style is fairy rich due to its origins varying from different cultural/geographical backrounds. -
Appalachian Spring
Ballet for Martha Graham by Aaron Copland. Martha Graham also danced the lead. It also includes a Shaker tune called “Simple Gifts” -
Steel Guitar Strings
Doc Kaufman started the K and F Company. -They produced steel guitars and amplifiers. -
A Black Pierrot” from Songs of Separation
The lyrics are the poem by Langston Hughes. It is about him being rejected in love because of his color so he never succeeds. It has chromatic harmony and a strong Blues influence.
Through-composed -
Rock 'n Roll
During the mid 1950s, Chuck Berry, along with Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, Fats Domino, and Jerry Lee Lewis, blended the musical styles of jump blues and honky-tonk with an edgy attitude to create a new genre known as rock ‘n’ roll. This music was aimed at teenagers. -
Regency TR-1 Transistor Radio
. Regency and Texas Instruments (yes, of calculator fame) joined forces for a more intuitive and affordable model. The duo debuted the TR-1 in 1954, ostensibly making rock and roll accessible to the masses and allowing generations of baseball-game attendees to keep one ear on the AM broadcasts, lest they err on their box score. -
Period: to
Serialist [US] Period
Serialism began primarily with Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, though some of his contemporaries were also working to establish serialism as a form of post-tonal thinking. Another pre-20th-century example of serialism is the ground bass, a pattern of harmonies or of melody that repeats, most often in the lower vocal or instrumental parts of a composition. -
First Synthesizer Invented
The first electronic sound synthesizer, an instrument of awesome dimensions, was developed by the American acoustical engineers Harry Olson and Herbert Belar in 1955 at the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) laboratories at Princeton, New Jersey. -
West Side Story
A broadway musical created by William Bernstein which is a Romeo and Juliet saga. His experience as a conductor of classical music, as a performer of classical music and jazz, and as a teacher all lead to a special kind of theatrical work. -
Philips Compact Cassette Tape Invented
Phillips, who consolidated the hulking reel-to-reel and revealed the first cassette tape at a 1963 fair in Berlin. Its actual tape was just more than three millimeters wide, but the product's impact was vast. Cassettes would become the chief mode for distributing albums alongside vinyl and CDs before the digital revolution, not to mention a beloved means of self-expression (via mixtapes) for millions of heart-aching teens. -
8-Track Tape
Bill Lear, businessman and inventor behind the Learjet. In 1964, he produced beta versions of his eight-track model − a leaner, more efficient update of inventor George Eash's Fidelipac − for RCA and Ford executives. The former licensed their music catalogue to Lear, while the latter offered eight-track player installation in their '66 models. -
Technics SL-1200 Turntables invented
MK2 hit streets in 1979. Its improved pitch-adjustment capability, simplified start/stop button and quartz-lock control system, coupled with Technics' existing direct-drive motor (as opposed to more tenuous belt systems),. -
Mom was Born
Mom was born in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. At around age 5, she moves to Tampico -
The Walkman is Invented
Sony's Walkman, which arrived in 1979 as a convenient, fashionable way to make an already portable innovation even more portable. The Walkman represented a true synergy of music tech, for it wouldn't have been possible without Phillips' cassette tape or Nathaniel Baldwin's headphones. -
Commercial Compact Disc Invented
Phillips and Sony cracked heads on an optical 12-centimeter audio disc that could reproduce hi-fi-worthy sound. All it took was harnessing surface laser-beam reflections that converted digital data into analog sound. In 1982, Billy Joel's 52nd Street became commercially available on Compact Disc in Japan, and the next overnight tech phenomenon was birthed. The CD instantly threatened extinction for vinyl and cassettes, though ironically, it currently battles obsolescence against the mighty MP3 -
Cum on Feel the Noiz
This song was released by Quiet Riot in the album "Metal Health" -
Akai S900 Sampler Invented
Two years after Japanese electronics manufacturer Akai broke ground, they busted open possibilities for hip-hop and electronic producers venturing beyond their tables' mix-match capabilities. The S900 sampler could store and edit more than 30 re-purposed sound bites at once, and made compositional looping and manipulation a reality. -
The World Wide web invented
In March 1989, British computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee (who naturally has been knighted for his accomplishment) drafted a proposal to ease virtual communication through an interlinked series, or web, of e-notes. A year later, he created a browser, and in 1993, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), granted the technology into free, worldwide usage. The Web would, of course, decentralize how we receive and share information and change the planet. -
Pro tools invented
Digidesign founders Peter Gotcher and Evan Brooks first released Sound Tools, a completely digital recording and editing system for Apple Macintosh. But it was the reboot as Pro Tools in 1991 − with multitrack capabilities and faster processing − that broke the mold. Digidesign was later absorbed by Avid, and Pro Tools reigns among amateur artists and elite engineers alike, even if some idealists would trade its ease and affordability for the crackling imperfections of vintage hardware. -
MP3 INVENTED
German audio engineer Karlheinz Bradenburg helped a professor search for ways to apply digital-phone technology to music transmission. Over the next 13 years, as computers became more sophisticated, so did Bradenburg's advances in compression (his biggest snag, amazingly, came when trying to capture, sans distortion, -
Auto-Tune invented
Antares Audio Technologies (originally called Jupiter Systems), was founded in 1990 by geophysicist Dr. Andy Hildebrand. Using the same Digital Signal Processing (DSP) technology he employed to measure seismic data, Hildebrand first patented the Infinity sample-looping software and various Pro-Tools plug-ins. But it was Auto-Tune − a DSP-powered program used to course correct vocals and instruments − that etched his legacy. I -
Ragtime
A Broadway Musical which takes its musical style from this early 20th-century American style. Ragtime is a musical with music by Stephen Flaherty, lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, and a book by Terrence McNally. It is based on the 1975 novel of the same name by E.L. Doctorow. -
Ipod invented
iPod was made commercially available in October 2001. Sure, it cost $400 and needed semi-regular charges, but who could argue with 5 GB of collated, alphabetized, prioritized albums, songs and playlists all available and scrollable via a touch-sensitive pinwheel? Thirteen years hence, the iPod's capabilities have merged with telecommunications via the iPhone, inspired scores of failed imitators (hello, Zune) and spawned advertising campaigns that achieved standalone iconography. -
Sound cloud invented
Enterprising Swedes Alex Ljung and Eric Wahlforss launched Soundcloud from a Berlin office in Fall 2007. At the time, their aspiration was for artists and others in the music industry to have a simpler platform than MySpace for sharing songs with one another. By Summer 2009, they registered more than 160,000 users.