Composers have been coming up with new and inventive ways to expand the realm of choral music for centuries. New instruments and techniques are constantly being developed, but many of these techniques fail to secure a lasting foothold and gain traction. Many techniques of the twentieth and twenty-first century incorporate additional dissonances to compose chord resolutions, chord successions, and chord progressions that are atypical of classical music before 1910. Composers continue to push the field of music composition forward with new sounds and music to keep audiences entertained, provide new music, and push the boundaries of what is possible in a composition.
Chord Construction
Traditional chords consist of varying arrangements of major, …show more content…
Far from setting out to destroy music in all it's forms, Arnold Schoenberg's first compositions were extremely tonal and almost indistinguishable from the works of other Romantic period composers. In a search for a way to secure the German music tradition for the "next 1000 years," Schoenberg searched for a way to present music in a new way. This reorganization resulted in what we now call serialism. In it's more severe and restricted form, the technique is called twelve-tone composition, where every note in a chromatic scale must be used once before it is repeated. Other less strict forms involve creating cells and sets of notes that are repeated at various transpositions and re-ordered to continually change the musical elements in a composition. The goal of serialism was to break off the pull of tonal music and open up the ear to hearing the frowned upon and less widely received dissonances of earlier classical music. Serialism challenged the concept of what was musically acceptable and opened our ears to the world of dissonance. Composers occasionally use serialism in their choral compositions to create elaborate new …show more content…
A composer might choose to have a melody in the key of C major and harmony in the key of Ab minor. This juxtaposition of more than one key center makes it possible to create music that may follow some basic tenets of tonality, while still advancing the craft and creating modern, dissonant sounds. While this type of music can be difficult to sing well, college level and professional choirs should have no problem performing polytonal works. Bitonality is essentially the same thing as polytonality. However, with bitonality only two key centers are used in the composition. Igor Stravinsky and other twentieth century composers, like Charles Ives, were well known for incorporating these techniques in their musical
Chord Construction
Traditional chords consist of varying arrangements of major, …show more content…
Far from setting out to destroy music in all it's forms, Arnold Schoenberg's first compositions were extremely tonal and almost indistinguishable from the works of other Romantic period composers. In a search for a way to secure the German music tradition for the "next 1000 years," Schoenberg searched for a way to present music in a new way. This reorganization resulted in what we now call serialism. In it's more severe and restricted form, the technique is called twelve-tone composition, where every note in a chromatic scale must be used once before it is repeated. Other less strict forms involve creating cells and sets of notes that are repeated at various transpositions and re-ordered to continually change the musical elements in a composition. The goal of serialism was to break off the pull of tonal music and open up the ear to hearing the frowned upon and less widely received dissonances of earlier classical music. Serialism challenged the concept of what was musically acceptable and opened our ears to the world of dissonance. Composers occasionally use serialism in their choral compositions to create elaborate new …show more content…
A composer might choose to have a melody in the key of C major and harmony in the key of Ab minor. This juxtaposition of more than one key center makes it possible to create music that may follow some basic tenets of tonality, while still advancing the craft and creating modern, dissonant sounds. While this type of music can be difficult to sing well, college level and professional choirs should have no problem performing polytonal works. Bitonality is essentially the same thing as polytonality. However, with bitonality only two key centers are used in the composition. Igor Stravinsky and other twentieth century composers, like Charles Ives, were well known for incorporating these techniques in their musical