What were the key features of early 20th-century avant-garde music?

Early 20th-century avant-garde music was characterized by a departure from traditional musical norms and the exploration of new and innovative techniques. Key features of avant-garde music during this period included:

Dissonance

Avant-garde composers often incorporated dissonant sounds and intervals into their compositions, challenging conventional notions of harmony and creating a sense of tension and instability in their music.

Unconventional scales

Composers like Arnold Schoenberg and his followers experimented with unconventional scales, such as the twelve-tone scale, which abandoned traditional tonality and paved the way for atonal music.

Experimental techniques

Avant-garde composers embraced experimental techniques such as serialism, which organized musical elements in a strict and predetermined manner, and musique concrète, which incorporated recorded sounds and electronic manipulation into compositions.

This period of musical innovation and exploration laid the foundation for modernist music and influenced generations of composers to push boundaries and challenge established norms in the pursuit of artistic expression.