Why did tonality break down in the twentieth century?

Ever-increasing chromaticism in the late nineteenth century weakened the sense of a single key center, and composers such as Schoenberg eventually abandoned functional tonality altogether in favor of new organizing principles.

Is there a single style of contemporary classical music?

No. Since the late twentieth century the field has been radically pluralistic, encompassing minimalism, spectralism, neo-Romanticism, electronic music, and many hybrids without a dominant common practice.

Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Music

The shattering of common-practice tonality and the proliferation of new musical languages from 1900 to today.

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Definition

The diverse art music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, marked by the dissolution of common-practice tonality and the multiplication of competing compositional languages and technologies.

Scope

Covers Western art music from roughly 1900 to the present: the breakdown of tonality, atonality and serialism, neoclassicism, the experimental and indeterminacy movements, electronic and computer music, minimalism, and the pluralism of contemporary practice. Notes interaction with popular and non-Western musics; excludes the technical apparatus of post-tonal analysis, treated under form and analysis.

Core questions

How and why did common-practice tonality break down around 1900?
What were atonality, serialism, and neoclassicism?
How did experimentalism, indeterminacy, and electronic music expand the field?
What is minimalism, and how did it react against modernist complexity?
How is contemporary music characterized by stylistic pluralism?

Key concepts

Atonality and free atonality
Twelve-tone serialism
Neoclassicism
Indeterminacy and chance music
Electronic and computer music
Minimalism
Spectralism
Postmodern pluralism

History

The early twentieth century saw Stravinsky's rhythmic primitivism and Schoenberg's move to atonality and then serialism shatter common-practice norms; the postwar decades brought total serialism, Cage's indeterminacy, electronic studios, and then a minimalist and postmodern reaction, leaving contemporary practice radically pluralistic.

Debates

Modernist progress versus accessibility: Postwar music was split between an avant-garde that pursued ever greater complexity as historical necessity and critics and composers who argued such music had lost its audience, a tension that minimalism and postmodern eclecticism later answered.

Key figures

Igor Stravinsky
Arnold Schoenberg
John Cage
Steve Reich
Pierre Boulez

Seminal works

burkholder2019
morgan1991
ross2007

Frequently asked questions

Why did tonality break down in the twentieth century?: Ever-increasing chromaticism in the late nineteenth century weakened the sense of a single key center, and composers such as Schoenberg eventually abandoned functional tonality altogether in favor of new organizing principles.
Is there a single style of contemporary classical music?: No. Since the late twentieth century the field has been radically pluralistic, encompassing minimalism, spectralism, neo-Romanticism, electronic music, and many hybrids without a dominant common practice.