The early twentieth century was a time of economic uncertainty and political upheaval. Escalating international tension would eventually result in the First World War. Radical new theories led to the overthrow of conventional ideas in all fields. In 1905 Albert Einstein produced his Special Theory of Relativity. His theories revolutionized ideas about the nature of the physical universe. In 1900 Sigmund Freud published his “Interpretation of Dreams” in which he proposed that many human actions are motivated by an irrational subconscious mind. Pablo Picasso contributed to the overthrow of conventional norms in the field of visual arts. Picasso confronted his viewers with a fragmented and distorted vision of abstract reality.

The general intellectual climate at the beginning of the twentieth century was characterized by a withdrawal from the assumptions of previous generations.

“Modern man finds himself with an immense system of institutions, established facts and customs which have come down to him from times not modern. Though his life must move forward, he has a sense that this system is not of his own creation, and that it by no means corresponds to the wants of his actual life. Life has become customary, not rational. The awakening of this sense is the awakening of the modern spirit.” Christopher Butler

Like other artists of the period, composers felt the necessity of making a break with the past. They sought to create a new musical language which expressed the mood of the modern age. This “New Music” was by necessity experimental and it proved to be extraordinarily provocative.  Nevertheless, these composers laid the foundation for everything that would follow. Their music created a psychological portrait of the mood of the early twentieth century and they created some of the greatest musical masterpieces of all time.

Unlike the previous musical eras we have studied, the Twentieth Century consists of a vast number of ‘schools of composition’. These schools include Impressionism, Expressionism, Primitivism, Exoticism, Serialism, Aleatoricism, Neo-Classicism and Minimalism.