By the 1920s, Ives had experimented with practically every important musical
innovation that would still be considered new music 50 years later, including
atonality, bitonality, polymetric patterns, polyharmonic and polytonal partic-
ulars, quarter tones, microtones, tone clusters, and tone rows. Realizing that
his music was too unconventional for most people to enjoy, he composed pri-
marilyfor his own pleasure and, except for works for organ and church choirs,
most of his compositions remained unperformed for years.
During most of his life, Ives was treated simply as a musical eccentric.
Fortunately, he lived just long enough to see his work begin to be accepted.
His Symphony No. 3 (The Camp Meeting) won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947. In all,
Ives wrote a staggeringly large amount of music: four symphonies, numerous
large and small orchestral and chamber works, two finger-breaking, sprawling
piano sonatas, four violin sonatas, many choral pieces, short solo piano, and
organ works, and nearly 200 songs.
Béla Bartók, 1881–1945................................................................................
Béla Bartók was another very important figure in 20th-century music. The
Hungarian-born composer and pianist’s most lasting contribution to music is
his incorporation of Hungarian folk music into his compositions. Not only is he
considered one of the greatest composers of the 20th century, but he was also
one of the founders of the field of ethnomusicology, or the study and ethnog-
raphy of folk music. As a composer, Bartók was an influential modernist, who
used such revolutionary techniques as atonality, bitonality, polymodal chro-
maticism, octonal scales, diatonic and heptatonic second and seven-note
scales, whole-tone scales, and many other principles outside the realm of
what was then considered musically acceptable.
The defining event of Bartók’s musical life occurred in 1905, when he and
fellow Hungarian composer Zoltan Kodály journeyed into remote rural areas
of Hungary to collect the peasant songs of the Magyar, an ancient semi-
nomadic people that had lived in the region for possibly thousands of years.
The melodies and rhythms of Magyarok folk music incorporated scale and
rhythmic patterns that lay completely outside the traditions of 19th century
Western music. Ironically, these scales and rhythms were a lot like the ones
being “invented” and explored by early 20th-century modernists such as
French composers Clause Debussy and Maurice Ravel.
Before Bartók and Kodály’s examination of the Magyars’ music, most people
had considered Magyarok folk music to be Gypsy music. In actuality, the old
Magyarok folk melodies discovered by Bartók and Kodály were almost all
based on pentatonic scales similar to those found in various Oriental folk
traditions, notably those of Central Asia and Siberia.
Chapter 20: Ten Composers You Should Know About ..............................................
