Twentieth century classical music

20th-century classical music describes orchestral works, chamber music, solo instrumental works (including keyboard music), electronic music, choral music, songs, operas, ballets, concertos, symphonies, and related forms, as well as fantasies, rhapsodies, fugues, passacaglias and chaconnes, variations, oratorios, cantatas, suites, improvisational and newly developed formal concepts such as variable and mobile forms, that were written from 1901 to 2000. Defined entirely by the calendar, this century was without a dominant style and composers created highly diverse kinds of music. Modernism, impressionism, and post-romanticism can all be traced to the decade before the turn of the century. Neoclassicism, and expressionism, came mostly after 1900. Minimalism started much later in the century and can be seen as a change from the modern to post-modern era, although some date post-modernism from as early as ca. 1930. Atonality, serialism, musique concrète and electronic music were all developed during this century. Jazz was an important influence on many composers at this time.

At the turn of the century, music was characteristically late Romantic in style. Composers such as Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss and Jean Sibelius were pushing the bounds of Post-Romantic Symphonic writing. At the same time, the Impressionist movement, spearheaded by Claude Debussy, was being developed in France. Debussy in fact loathed the term Impressionism: "I am trying to do 'something different—in a way realities—what the imbeciles call 'impressionism' is a term which is as poorly used as possible, particularly by art critics" (Politoske and Martin 1988, 419). Maurice Ravel's music, also often labelled as impressionist, explores music in many styles not always related to it (see the discussion on Neoclassicism, below).

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