Classical Music
Italy has long been a center for European classical music, and by the beginning of the 20th century, Italian classical music had forged a distinct national sound that was decidedly Romantic and melodic. As typified by the operas of Verdi, it was music in which "...The vocal lines always dominate the tonal complex and are never overshadowed by the instrumental accompaniments..." Italian classical music had resisted the "German harmonic juggernaut"—that is, the dense harmonies of Richard Wagner, Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss. Italian music also had little in common with the French reaction to that German music—the impressionism of Claude Debussy, for example, in which melodic development is largely abandoned for the creation of mood and atmosphere through the sounds of individual chords.
European classical music changed greatly in the 20th century. New music abandoned much of the historical, nationally developed schools of harmony and melody in favor of experimental music, atonality, minimalism and electronic music, all of which employ features that have become common to European music in general and not Italy specifically. These changes have also made classical music less accessible to many people. Important composers of the period include Ottorino Respighi, Ferruccio Busoni, Alfredo Casella, Gian Francesco Malipiero, Franco Alfano, Bruno Maderna, Luciano Berio, Luigi Nono, Sylvano Bussotti, Salvatore Sciarrino, Luigi Dallapiccola, Carlo Jachino, Gian Carlo Menotti, Jacopo Napoli, and Goffredo Petrassi.
Read more about this topic: Music Of Italy
Famous quotes related to classical music:
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. ‘Material Differences,’ Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the former the music is always greater than its performance—Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, for instance, is always greater than its performance—whereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being performed.”
—André Previn (b. 1929)