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"The entire history of modern music may be said to be a history of the gradual pull-away from the German musical tradition of the past century." —AARON COPLAND

Key Points

  • The diverse artistic trends of the early twentieth century were a reaction against Romanticism.
  • Early-twentieth-century artistic trends explored simplicity and abstraction (interest in non- Western arts, Dadaism, Cubism) and the world of dreams and the inner soul (Surrealism, Expressionism).
  • Expressionism was the German response to French Impressionism; in music, composers such as Schoenberg and Webern explored new harmonic systems and the extreme registers of instruments.
  • The Neoclassical movement sought to revive balance and objectivity in the arts by returning to formal structures of the past.

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