Musical Styles

Since World War II, we have lived with instant communication-television, computers, and space sattelites provide acess to a virtually unlimited flow of information. Not only have we been bombarded by an incredible vaiety of stimuli, but there has also been a constant demand for novelty. New styles in fashion and the visual arts spread rapidly and then dissapear.

Chance Music

The 1950's witnessed not only serialism but an opposite approach known as chance, or aleatory, music(from the Latin alea, or game of chance). In chance music, composers choose pitches, tone colors, and rhythms by random method such as throwing coins. They may also ask performers to choose the ordering of music al material or even to choose much of the material itself. For example, a composer might write out brief passages of a composition bur ask the performer to play them in any desired order. Or a composer might indicate a group of pitches but direct the performer to invent rhythmic patterns.
 

Minimalist Music

The mid-1960's saw the development of an artistic movement called minimalism, which was partly a reaction against the complxity of serialism and randomness of chance music. Minimalist music is characterized by steady pulse, clear tonality and insistent repetition of shot melodic patterns. It's dynamic level, texture and haormany tend to stay constant for fairly long streches of time, creating trance like or hypnotic effect.

Electronic Music

Since the development of tape studios, synthesizers and computers in the 1950s and 1960s, composers heve had potentially unlimited resouces for the production and control of sound. Electronic music is a diverse as nonelectronic music. Electronic instruments let composers control tone color, duration, dynamics andpitsh with unprecedented precision. Composers are no longer limited by human performers. The audiotape of a composition is the composition. Thus, a composer alone is now responsible for putting into music the subtle variations of rhythm, tone color, and dynamics that once rested with the performer.

Music and Musicians in Society
The twentieth century has seen dramatic changes in how music reaches its listeners. The living room has become the new 'concert hall' through recordings, radio, and television. These technological advances have brought music to a larger audience than ever before, besides vastely increasing the range of music available. Today's repertory of recorded music incluedes not only familiar classics, but also Renaissance, early baroque, nonwestern and unconventional twentieth-century works-music not often played in concert. Recordings of lesser0known music multiplied with the appearance of long-playing disks in 1948. But as early as 1904, composers' interpretaions of their own works were recorded, giving composers an unprecedented oppurtunity to communicate precisely their intentions about phrasing, dynamics and tempo.