Performs music sample from the 20th century
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The 20th century and beyond
The major performing institutions of the 19th century have continued into the 21st century with only minimum structural change, except for a rather belated movement toward unionization of personnel; this development has of course improved the performers’ lot greatly, while increasing the costs of performance. Unquestionably, the major new influence on 20th-century music performance was electronics. Broadcasting and recording widened even further the potential audience for concert artists, at the same time as they tended to decrease the physical necessity for large new public performance arenas. Electronic instruments appeared, both amplified versions of older ones (guitar, piano, and even some woodwinds) and instruments with fundamentally electronic means of tone production (electronic pianos and organs, the theremin and Ondes Martenot, sound synthesizers, and still later developments). Other new compositional and performance possibilities also emerged—for example, film, tape, stereophonism, and computers. Even before the phonograph (invented c. 1875) had begun to be regarded as more than a toy, serious research into the authentic performance of older music had produced an awareness of possibilities that pointed the way out of late Romantic gigantism and subjectivism. From the very beginning of the 20th century, the chamber concerts given by Arnold Dolmetsch and his family, on reconstructions of old gambas and recorders, attracted attention to small ensembles and different sonorities and encouraged the activities of other artists.
The true end of the Romantic era and the beginning of the modern era can be dated from the second decade of the 20th century, the time of the composition of two masterpieces that more than any others mark the departure from 19th-century performance ideas: the German composer Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (1912) and the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky’s Histoire du soldat (1918; The Soldier’s Tale). These are chamber works, but their instrumental makeup is a unique mixture of instruments that do not necessarily blend and that seem further to repudiate the orchestra as a performing medium. Pierrot is a series of songs that repudiate the 19th-century lied: the voice does not sing but produces a kind of pitched speech (Sprechstimme). Histoire repudiates both orchestra and opera as previously understood: it is specifically (and inexpensively) designed for performance on a portable stage by three dancers, a narrator, and seven instrumentalists. For these works a new kind of performer was required, and these works in turn helped to train the new performer—who might be called the group-virtuoso. Teams or groups of such performers subsequently sprang up everywhere. Often centred on a living composer or the university where he or she taught, they essentially functioned as partners in the compositional process, realizing the work rather than interpreting it. Such performers were very much involved in the creative act, the product of which reflected their particular skills and personalities, and the dynamics of the working situation. Among the most influential composers of the 21st century has been John Adams, known for blending diverse musical genres—including jazz, pop, and electronic music—in his works as well as assembling vocal texts from popular media, government documents, personal interviews, and other sources.
Since the mid-20th century the established performance situation has moved from the formal, ritualized event of the past to a more informal and spontaneous type of gathering. The interaction of various media has led to new art forms and circumstances. Many artists have attempted to create performance situations that actively involve as participants all those in attendance. In such compositions, the roles of composer, performer, and listener are consolidated in a single participant, who in interaction with others arrives at an art work, which all have invented, realized, and perceived, and which can never take place in exactly the same way again. On the other hand, the ever-increasing use of technology has intensified the problem of evaluating the meaning and effect of electronically produced and assembled performances that, in their totality, never took place at all and possibly never could.
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