34.02.03 · music-art / music-history

20th-century and world music: modernism, jazz, non-Western traditions, popular music

stub3 tiersLean: nonepending prereqs

Anchor (Master): Adorno, T. W. — Philosophy of New Music (1949)

Intuition Beginner

The 20th century shattered every musical convention. Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) abandoned tonality, creating atonal music where no key center exists, then invented serialism, in which all 12 pitches are used in a fixed order called a tone row. Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring (1913) provoked a riot at its Paris premiere with its savage rhythms and dissonance. Claude Debussy had already broken Romantic harmony with shimmering, non-functional chords called impressionism.

Jazz emerged from African American communities, evolving from New Orleans Dixieland through swing (Duke Ellington, Count Basie) to the fast, complex bebop of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and on to the searching free jazz of John Coltrane. Each style treated improvisation as the heart of the music rather than a decorative add-on.

Rock and roll exploded in the 1950s with Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry, then evolved through the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and the punks. In the 1970s, hip-hop was born at Bronx block parties with DJ Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash, becoming by century's end a global language of youth culture.

Electronic music, from Robert Moog's synthesizers to digital production software, created sound worlds no acoustic instrument could produce. Meanwhile non-Western traditions flourished alongside the Western ones: Indian classical (Ravi Shankar's sitar), Indonesian gamelan, West African drumming, and Brazilian bossa nova. The walls between "classical," "popular," and "world" music began to dissolve.

Visual Beginner

Movement / tradition	Era & origin	Defining features	Representative figures
Impressionism	c. 1890-1920, France	Whole-tone and pentatonic scales, parallel chords, non-functional harmony, color over cadence	Debussy, Ravel
Primitivism & free atonality	c. 1908-23, Russia/Vienna	Polyrhythm, ostinato, bitonality; no key center; expressionist intensity	Stravinsky, early Schoenberg
Serialism (12-tone)	from 1923, Vienna	All 12 pitch classes ordered in a fixed row; equality of pitches	Schoenberg, Berg, Webern
Neoclassicism	1920s-50s, pan-European	Return to Baroque/Classical models, clarity, order after the war	Stravinsky, Hindemith
Jazz	c. 1900-present, USA	Swing rhythm, blue notes, improvisation, blues harmony	Armstrong, Ellington, Parker, Davis, Coltrane
Rock / pop / hip-hop	1950s-present, USA/global	Verse-chorus song forms, electric instruments, sampling, backbeat	Beatles, Hendrix, Dylan, Public Enemy
Non-Western traditions	continuous, global	Raga & tala (India), colotomic gong cycles (gamelan), polyrhythmic drumming (West Africa), maqam microtones (Arabic)	Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan

Worked example Beginner

On May 29, 1913, the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in Paris hosted the premiere of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, a ballet depicting pagan sacrifice in prehistoric Russia. The audience rioted. Catcalls and fistfights forced the choreographer Nijinsky to shout counts to the dancers from the wings while the impresario Diaghilev flicked the auditorium lights on and off.

What scandalized them was the sound. A bassoon wails in a register so high it seems to shriek. Then the "Augurs of Spring" chord crashes down, an E-flat dominant seventh heaped on top of an E major triad: two keys sounding at once, a technique called bitonality. Above it, jagged accents punch in patterns that refuse to settle into one steady meter, a competing-layer effect called polyrhythm.

Stravinsky did not abandon notes; he abandoned the expectation that harmony must be smooth and meter regular. By layering competing rhythms and clashing chords, he made rhythm itself the engine of the music. A century later those same techniques echo in film scores, progressive rock, and electronic dance music. The riot became the founding myth of musical modernism.

Check your understanding Beginner

Exercise (easy, multiple choice).

Arnold Schoenberg's two great contributions to 20th-century music were the abandonment of tonality (atonality) and the invention of which technique, in which all twelve pitches are arranged in a fixed order?

A. The leitmotif B. The twelve-tone (serial) method C. The whole-tone scale D. Basso continuo

Hint

The technique treats all twelve chromatic pitches as equal by ordering them into a "row" that the composer then transforms.

Answer

Option B.

Schoenberg introduced the twelve-tone method around 1923, ordering the twelve chromatic pitch classes into a tone row and deriving an entire composition from that row and its transformations. The leitmotif is Wagner's; the whole-tone scale belongs to Debussy's impressionism; basso continuo is a Baroque practice.

Exercise (medium, short answer).

The boundaries between "classical," "popular," and "world" music weakened during the 20th century. Give two concrete examples of cross-fertilization between these categories.

Answer

Many examples fit. Debussy absorbed the Javanese gamelan he heard at the 1889 Paris Exposition and reshaped Western harmony with its textures (a "world" tradition entering "classical" music). The Beatles studied with Ravi Shankar and used the sitar on several records, bringing Indian classical music into popular song. Hip-hop producers sample recordings of every genre, collapsing the classical/popular/world distinction by treating all recorded sound as raw material. Minimalist composers such as Steve Reich drew on West African drumming and Balinese gamelan, while jazz artists from Dizzy Gillespie onward fused jazz with Afro-Cuban rhythm. Any two such examples show that the categories are historical and commercial rather than musical.

Formal definition Intermediate+

Musical modernism is the cluster of early-20th-century movements that broke, one after another, with the Romantic assumption that music is organized around a single tonal center and a regular meter. Each movement named a different break.

Impressionism (Debussy, Ravel; see 34.01.02) rejects functional harmony in favor of color. Characteristic devices are the whole-tone scale (six pitches each a whole step apart, yielding no leading tone and no dominant), parallel chord motion that defies the classical rule against consecutive fifths and octaves, the pentatonic scale, and a non-directional harmony in which chords are heard as sonorities rather than as steps in a cadence. The 1889 Paris Exposition exhibited a Javanese gamelan to European audiences; Debussy absorbed its colotomic textures and non-Western tunings, and his Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (1894) is conventionally taken as the opening of musical modernism.

Primitivism (Stravinsky, Bartok; see 34.01.03) makes rhythm and dissonance the structural engine. The Rite of Spring layers polymeter (different instruments in different meters simultaneously), ostinato (the relentless repetition of a short cell), and bitonality (two keys at once, as in the "Augurs of Spring" chord). Bartok's primitivism took the form of harsh, percussive piano writing (Allegro barbaro) and a systematic integration of Eastern European folk song into art-music forms. Free atonality (c. 1908-23, Schoenberg) is the brief expressionist period in which no key governs the music: Erwartung and Pierrot Lunaire (with its half-sung, half-spoken Sprechstimme) set feverish expressionist texts (see 32.17.* on expressionism in the visual arts).

Serialism, or the twelve-tone method (Schoenberg, from 1923; see 34.01.03), is the systematization of atonality. The composer fixes an ordering of all twelve pitch classes, the tone row (or series), and derives the entire piece from that row and its transformations. Alban Berg softened the method into a more lyrical idiom in Wozzeck and the Violin Concerto; Anton Webern pushed it toward extreme concision and pointillist texture, exerting a decisive influence on the post-war European avant-garde (Boulez, Stockhausen). Neoclassicism (Stravinsky, from c. 1920; Hindemith) is the interwar "return to order" (Pulcinella, Symphony of Psalms), reviving Baroque and Classical models within a modern harmonic language (see 34.02.02; 32.21.* on the interwar return to order).

Jazz is defined less by a single technique than by a constellation: syncopated swing rhythm (a long-short subdivision of the beat), "blue notes" (pitches bent between the major and minor third or seventh), improvisation over a repeating harmonic framework, and a characteristic repertory of chord progressions (the twelve-bar blues and the ii-V-I progression; see 34.01.02). Its lineage runs from collective Dixieland improvisation (King Oliver, early Louis Armstrong, who made the solo improvisation the center of the music) through arranged swing (Ellington, Basie, Goodman), to bebop (Parker, Gillespie, Monk, Powell), which abandoned dance function for art-music complexity, fast tempos, and enriched harmony. Cool jazz (Davis Birth of the Cool), hard bop (Blakey, Silver, with gospel inflection), modal jazz (Davis Kind of Blue, substituting scales for chord progressions), free jazz (Coleman, Coltrane, Ayler, dissolving fixed form and harmony), and fusion (Davis, electric instruments; see 33.07.*) follow.

Popular music is best treated not as a single style but as a set of genres organized around the recording, the short song form (verse-chorus), electric and electronic instruments, and mass distribution. Rock and roll fuses blues and country (Presley, Berry, Little Richard); the British Invasion (Beatles, Stones) re-exported it (see 30.02.03); folk revival and protest (Dylan), soul (Brown, Franklin, Gaye, Motown, Stax), psychedelic rock (Hendrix, Pink Floyd), punk (Ramones, Sex Pistols, DIY), and hip-hop (Bronx, 1970s; DJ Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, Public Enemy, N.W.A.; sampling as a compositional tool, see 33.07., 36.) each represent a distinct synthesis. Electronic dance music (Kraftwerk, Detroit techno, Chicago house, drum and bass, dubstep) makes the DJ and the recording the primary agents (see 33.07.*).

Non-Western traditions are organized by systems that are neither tonal nor song-form-based. Indian classical music is built on the raga (a melodic framework specifying scale, characteristic phrases, ornamentation, and emotional character or rasa) and the tala (a cyclic rhythmic pattern), performed by a soloist (sitar, sarod, voice) against the tabla's rhythmic floor (Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan; see 31.05.* on whether the musical system shapes perception). Indonesian gamelan (Javanese and Balinese) organizes time by colotomic structure, the cycle of gong strokes that punctuates the music, with interlocking parts (kotekan) divided between players. West African traditions (Ewe, Yoruba, Mandinka) are built on polyrhythm and cross-rhythm, the djembe and the talking drum, and the integration of drumming with dance and oral narrative. Arabic maqam is a microtonal melodic mode system; Japanese gagaku, koto, and shakuhachi and Chinese qin traditions each carry their own pitch and formal organization (see 32.05., 32.10.).

Ethnomusicology, the comparative study of the world's musics in their cultural context, supplies the method for studying all of the above on their own terms. Its instruments are the Hornbostel-Sachs classification of instruments (idiophone, membranophone, chordophone, aerophone, electrophone; see 31.05.), field recording (originally via the Berlin phonogram archive; see 33.07.), Alan Lomax's cantometrics (a cross-cultural classification of singing style), and Mantle Hood's concept of bi-musicality, the ethnomusicologist's obligation to learn to perform the music studied.

Key theorem with proof Intermediate+

Theorem (the 48-form serial aggregate). Let $P = (p_{0}, p_{1}, \dots, p_{11})$ be a twelve-tone row, a permutation of the pitch classes $Z_{12}$ . The four canonical transformations — the prime $P$ , the retrograde $R (P) = (p_{11}, \dots, p_{1}, p_{0})$ , the inversion $I (P) = (- p_{0}, - p_{1}, \dots, - p_{11}) (mod 12)$ , and the retrograde-inversion $R I = R \circ I$ — together with transposition $T_{n} (x) = x + n (mod 12)$ for $n \in Z_{12}$ — generate a group of order $48$ acting on rows. For a generic row, one with no nontrivial internal symmetry, the orbit of $P$ has exactly $48$ distinct forms. These $48$ forms exhaust the "serial universe" of the row and supply the entire compositional palette of twelve-tone music.

Proof sketch. The argument proceeds in four steps.

Step 1 (a Klein four-group on transformations). Retrograde $R$ reverses the order of the indices ${0, \dots, 11}$ but leaves pitch values untouched. Inversion $I$ negates pitch values (mod 12) but leaves the order of indices untouched. Because the two operations act on independent coordinates, they commute: $R \circ I = I \circ R$ . Together with the identity they form a group isomorphic to the Klein four-group $V_{4} = {P, R, I, R I}$ , in which every element is its own inverse.

Step 2 (transposition and the full group). Transposition $T_{n}$ adds $n$ modulo 12 to every pitch class, forming the cyclic group $Z_{12}$ . Retrograde commutes with transposition (reversing order does not affect adding a constant). Inversion conjugates $T_{n}$ into $T_{- n}$ , since negating then adding $n$ is the same as adding $- n$ then negating. The combined action is therefore a group $G$ of order $∣ Z_{12} ∣ \cdot ∣ V_{4} ∣ = 12 \cdot 4 = 48$ .

Step 3 (orbit-stabilizer gives the count). By the orbit-stabilizer theorem, $∣ Orb (P) ∣ \cdot ∣ Stab (P) ∣ = ∣ G ∣ = 48$ , where $Stab (P)$ is the set of group elements that leave $P$ unchanged. A row fixed by a non-identity group element possesses an internal symmetry (for instance a row equal to its own retrograde, or invariant under some transposed inversion). Such symmetric rows exist but are rare; a generic row has a stabilizer of size 1, containing only the identity. For such a row, $∣ Stab (P) ∣ = 1$ and the orbit contains the full $48$ forms.

Step 4 (compositional consequence). The 48 forms, conventionally labeled $P_{n}$ , $I_{n}$ , $R_{n}$ , $R I_{n}$ for $n = 0, \dots, 11$ , are the material from which a twelve-tone composition is built. Each form states the aggregate (all twelve pitch classes) exactly once, which is why the method is also called "composition with twelve tones." Composers such as Webern and, later, Babbitt and Boulez explored rows whose hexachordal halves relate by these very symmetries, a property called combinatoriality, in order to partition the aggregate across voices. The 48-form theorem is thus the key theorem of serialism: a single row, under a group of order 48, generates the entire controlled universe of a serial work.

Exercises Intermediate+

Exercise (medium, short answer).

Define bitonality and polymeter, and explain how Stravinsky uses both in the "Augurs of Spring" section of The Rite of Spring.

Answer

Bitonality is the simultaneous use of two different tonal centers; polymeter is the simultaneous use of two or more meters. In "Augurs of Spring" Stravinsky superimposes an E-flat dominant-seventh sonority on an E major triad, two triads a semitone apart, producing a bitonal chord that refuses to resolve to any single key. Against this, the strings hammer a single repeated eighth-note chord, but the accents fall in an irregular, shifting pattern that does not align with the notated meter, creating a polymetric (or at least metrically destabilized) surface. The combined effect transfers the work's dramatic argument — primitive ritual, resisted regularity — directly onto its musical materials.

Exercise (medium, short answer).

Miles Davis's Kind of Blue (1959) is the canonical record of modal jazz. What is modal jazz, and how does it differ from the bebop that preceded it?

Answer

Modal jazz replaces the rapidly changing chord progressions of bebop (which might cycle through several keys per chorus, typically around the ii-V-I progression) with sustained modes — seven-note scales such as Dorian or Mixolydian — held for many measures at a time. Instead of negotiating a dense harmonic obstacle course, the improviser explores a single scale and its melodic possibilities. The result is a slower harmonic rhythm, more space, and a more linear, singing melodic style. "So What," the album's opening track, sits on the D Dorian mode for sixteen bars before moving a half-step up to E-flat Dorian. This reduction of harmonic constraint paradoxically opened a new freedom, and Kind of Blue became one of the best-selling jazz records ever made.

Exercise (medium, short answer).

Take the row $P = (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11)$ (the chromatic ascent) as a toy example. Write down its retrograde $R (P)$ , its inversion $I (P)$ (taking inversion as negation mod 12), and its retrograde-inversion $R I (P)$ . What symmetry does this particular row possess, and how does it reduce the size of its orbit below 48?

Answer

$R (P) = (11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0)$ . $I (P) = (0, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1)$ . $R I (P) = R (I (P)) = (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 0)$ . Notice that $R I (P) = T_{1} (P)$ , the prime transposed up one semitone: shifting $P$ by $+ 1$ yields exactly the retrograde-inversion. This is a nontrivial symmetry, because the row $P = (0, 1, \dots, 11)$ has maximal internal regularity (each step is $+ 1$ ). Its stabilizer is nontrivial, so by orbit-stabilizer its orbit is smaller than 48. This is why the chromatic-scale row is musically useless for serial composition: too many of its 48 forms collapse into one another, and it carries no distinctive identity. Real twelve-tone rows are chosen precisely to avoid such symmetry, so that all 48 forms are distinct and independently characterful.

Exercise (hard, essay).

Theodor Adorno argued that popular music is structurally standardized (verse-chorus form, predictable harmony, repetition) and offers only "pseudo-individualization," whereas serial music demands the critical, autonomous thinking needed to resist mass society. Using the concept of bi-musicality and the actual harmonic practice of bebop or modal jazz, mount a reply to Adorno.

Hint

Consider whether the ii-V-I progression or a held mode is really less complex than a tone row, whether improvisation constitutes genuine individualization, and whether Adorno's standard applies symmetrically to both repertories.

Answer

Adorno's critique treats "complexity" as harmonic density measured against the European avant-garde, and on that measure bebop should fail. But the measure is question-begging. A Charlie Parker chorus over the blues is not a fixed object but a generated one: the framework (twelve-bar blues, ii-V-I substitutions) is shared, but the improvised line is created anew in each performance, and its quality lies in rhythmic displacement, motivic development, and interaction with the rhythm section — dimensions Adorno's score-based analysis cannot see. Modal jazz, by sustaining a single scale, shifts complexity from harmony to melodic invention and texture, much as Webern's pointillism shifts it from line to timbre. Mantle Hood's concept of bi-musicality sharpens the point: judgments made from outside a tradition, without the competence to hear its internal criteria, are unreliable. Adorno, by his own admission, could not hear jazz from the inside. A reply grounded in the music's actual practice therefore concludes that the standard of "critical autonomy" is not the monopoly of serialism, and that the verse-chorus frame of popular song no more condemns it than sonata form condemns Haydn.

Advanced results Master

Music and politics. The 20th century turned music into a battlefield of ideology. Shostakovich composed under Stalin's terror: his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was denounced in Pravda in 1936 as "muddle instead of music," and the Fifth Symphony (1937) was received as "a Soviet artist's reply to just criticism," though its forced rejoicing is heard by many as coded dissent (see 32.21.* on totalitarian cultural policy). In Nazi Germany the regime catalogued jazz, Jewish composers, and modernists as Entartete Musik (degenerate music); Bartok and Schoenberg were banned, and Jewish musicians were persecuted and murdered (see 30.04.03 on anti-Semitism). Apartheid South Africa spawned a resistant South African jazz and mbaqanga (see 30.04.03). In the United States, the civil rights movement sang itself into being — "We Shall Overcome," the freedom songs, and Bernice Johnson Reagon's ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock (see 30.07.). Hip-hop became a political instrument of the first order: Public Enemy's "Fight the Power" and N.W.A.'s "Fuck tha Police" made systemic racism audible to a global audience (see 30.06. on deviance, 30.04.03 on race). Nationalism, meanwhile, took ethnomusicological form in Bartok's and Kodaly's collecting of Hungarian and Romanian peasant song (see 34.02.02). John Cage and the avant-garde dismantled the definition of music itself: 4'33" (1952) frames ambient sound as music by having the performer stay silent; the prepared piano alters the instrument's timbre with inserted objects; and indeterminacy, influenced by Zen Buddhism, lets chance shape the work (see 20.10.* on Eastern philosophy, 31.02.04 on music as ritual).

Music and technology. The recording (Edison's phonograph, 1877) severed performance from the moment of hearing and turned music into a reproducible object — the condition of possibility for every genre that follows (see 33.07.). The electric guitar (Les Paul) and the amplifier made rock possible; the Moog and Buchla synthesizers (1960s) and the Cologne electronic music studio of Stockhausen opened a new sound source; MIDI (1983) standardized the control of digital instruments; and digital sampling became the foundation of hip-hop and electronic dance music. The internet completed the arc: Napster's peer-to-peer file sharing, then streaming platforms such as Spotify, reordered the economics of music, decoupling ownership from access and concentrating algorithmic gatekeeping in a handful of firms (see 36. on platform economics and media literacy, 30.02.03 on the culture industry's digital afterlife).

Music and cultural theory. Adorno's essays "On Popular Music" and Philosophy of New Music argue that the standardized forms of mass-distributed music reflect and reinforce the standardization of consciousness in industrial capitalism, while the difficulty of serial music demands the very autonomous subject mass culture works to dissolve (see 30.02.03, the Frankfurt School). The critique is powerful and controversial: Adorno was accused of Eurocentrism and of a tone-deaf dismissal of jazz, and later theorists replied in kind. Simon Frith's Performing Rites defends popular music as a site of genuine aesthetic judgment and identity formation (see 29.07.). Christopher Small's Musicking reframes music not as a noun (a thing, a score, a recording) but as a verb — an activity, a set of social relationships enacted in performance (see 34.07. on aesthetics). Susan McClary's Feminine Endings extends critical theory to gender, asking how the very categories of consonance, dissonance, and formal resolution encode narratives of desire and violence (see 34.01.03). Ronald Radano's Lying Up a Nation traces how race has structured the writing of American music history itself (see 30.04.03). Arjun Appadurai's theory of global flows frames "world music" as a category produced by globalization and hybridization (see 30.02.02); Paul Simon's Graceland (1986) and the surrounding debates about collaboration, credit, and cultural appropriation are the canonical case (see 30.02.02). The endangerment of musical traditions parallels language endangerment, and UNESCO's intangible cultural heritage framework is one institutional response (see 31.05.*).

Music and cognition; music and AI; music and health. Cognitive science has made music perception a central topic: Carol Krumhansl's work on tonal hierarchies shows that listeners internalize the statistical structure of their musical culture, so that the same pitch or chord is heard differently by listeners formed in different traditions (see 29.03.* on auditory perception). Music and emotion is an active research program (Juslin and Sloboda; see 29.11.02), as is music and memory — Oliver Sacks's Musicophilia documents the persistence of musical memory in Alzheimer's disease (see 29.04.). Artificial intelligence now composes: David Cope's EMI algorithmically recombines the styles of canonical composers, and generative systems such as Magenta, MuseNet, and OpenAI Jukebox produce novel music from prompts, raising sharp questions about authorship, copyright, and the nature of creativity (see 20.02.06 on AI ethics, 33.07. on computing history, 36.* on algorithmic curation and filter bubbles). Music information retrieval (MIR) — automatic chord recognition, transcription, recommendation — sits at the intersection of computing and musicology (see 50.). Finally, music therapy is an evidence-based clinical practice, from creative arts therapy (see 29.10., 35.05.) to the use of familiar music in dementia care and the anthropological study of music as healing across cultures (see 31.06.02 on ethnomedicine, 20.04. on aesthetic experience and well-being).

Connections Master

This unit extends outward in many directions at once. To world history (chapter 32) it connects the interwar "return to order" to neoclassicism (32.21.), totalitarian cultural policy to Shostakovich and Entartete Musik (32.21., 32.20.), the Columbian Exchange and the African diaspora to samba, jazz, and the popular musics of the Americas (32.14.), and the broader history of Islamic, Chinese, Indian, and Japanese civilizations to their respective musical traditions (32.05., 32.06., 32.10.*).

To philosophy (chapter 20) it connects aesthetics and the experience of the sublime (20.04.), Adorno's critical theory and the question of whether difficult art is morally required (30.02.03), and Zen and Eastern thought to Cage's indeterminacy (20.10.). The Schopenhauerian claim that music is the most metaphysical art, inherited from Wagner, continues to shape the high-cultural prestige of the modernist repertory.

To sociology (chapter 30) it ties the culture industry and the Frankfurt School's critique of mass culture to Adorno (30.02.03), race and ethnicity to the histories of jazz, hip-hop, and Entartete Musik (30.04.03), cultural diversity and appropriation to the "world music" debates (30.02.02), deviance and subculture to punk and hip-hop (30.06.), and social movements to the freedom songs and protest music of the century (30.07.). The institutions of the music industry — recording companies, streaming platforms, copyright regimes — are themselves sociological objects (30.02.03, 36.*).

To anthropology (chapter 31) it connects ethnomusicological fieldwork and participant observation (31.05.*), the Hornbostel-Sachs classification and the comparative method, bi-musicality as a model for embodied cultural learning, religion and ritual (31.02.04), and the medical-anthropological study of music as healing (31.06.02). The refusal to treat Western notation as a universal standard is an anthropological as much as a musicological claim.

Closer to home, the unit leans on music fundamentals for the harmonic and formal vocabulary of modernism and jazz (34.01.02, 34.01.03), on the preceding Western survey for Romanticism's breaking of convention (34.02.02), on psychology for the perception and neuroscience of music (29.03., 29.02.), on computing and media for recording, synthesis, sampling, AI, and platform economics (33.07., 36., 50.), and on health for music therapy and well-being (29.10., 35.05.*).

Historical and philosophical context Master

The standard story of 20th-century music was, for most of the century, a story of progress told from Vienna outward: tonality gave way to atonality, atonality to serialism, serialism to total serialism and the post-war avant-garde, with everything else — jazz, rock, the world's musics — relegated to a lower tier of "popular" or "vernacular" culture. This story did real work: it organized a vast and disorienting repertory into a narrative with a direction, and it gave composers, critics, and institutions a criterion of seriousness. But it was always an interpretation, and it carried ideological freight. It treated a single European avant-garde lineage as the measure of musical seriousness, and it quietly demoted the musics of most of the world's people, and of most of the West's own working classes, to the status of entertainment.

Theodore Adorno gave this hierarchy its most rigorous philosophical defense. For Adorno, the standardized verse-chorus form and predictable harmony of popular music mirrored the standardization of consciousness in administered mass society, while the irreducible difficulty of Schoenberg and Webern trained the very faculties of critical autonomy that mass culture worked to dissolve. The argument is powerful, and the insight that musical form carries social content reshaped musicology. But Adorno's dismissal of jazz was, even on his own terms, a failure of listening: he mistook a music he had not learned to hear for the absence of complexity, exactly the error bi-musicality was later coined to name. His defenders note that he wrote in the shadow of fascism; his critics note that the same shadow fell on the jazz musicians he dismissed.

The revision of the canon, gathered under the loose banner of the "new musicology" of the 1990s, is the philosophical consequence of these critiques. To ask who is admitted to the canon is to ask whose seriousness the tradition has been willing to recognize. Susan McClary asked how the categories of consonance and resolution encode assumptions about gender and desire; Christopher Small asked why we treat music as a noun (a score, a recording) rather than a verb (an activity among people); Ronald Radano asked how race has structured the very writing of American music history. Each of these questions reframes the object rather than abandoning it. The point is not that Beethoven or Schoenberg should be discarded, but that a history which can only measure other traditions against them is not yet a history of music.

The global frame sharpens the problem. The category "world music," invented by the record industry in the 1980s, lumps Indian classical, West African drumming, Javanese gamelan, and Brazilian bossa nova into a single bin defined only by not being Western classical or Anglo-American pop. It exoticizes what it catalogues, and it obscures the fact that musical traditions have never been sealed: Debussy absorbed gamelan, the Beatles absorbed Shankar, bebop absorbed Afro-Cuban rhythm, and hip-hop's samplers treat the entire recorded history of every tradition as a single archive. The honest account is that the 20th century produced not a hierarchy of musics but a network, and that the task of music history is to describe that network without pretending that one of its nodes is the center from which all the others are measured.

Bibliography Master

Taruskin, R. The Oxford History of Western Music. 6 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. See especially vols. 4-5 for the 20th century.
Gridley, M. C. Jazz Styles: History and Analysis. 11th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2012.
Nettl, B. The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-Three Discussions. 3rd ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015.
Adorno, T. W. Philosophy of New Music. Trans. R. Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Originally 1949.
McClary, S. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.
Small, C. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1998.
Frith, S. Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.
Katz, M. Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music. Rev. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.
Sacks, O. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.