Introducing Modern Music

by Ottó Károlyi

In this companion to his popular Introducing Music Otto Karolyi offers a lively and comprehensive guide to modern music and provides the reader with some technical understanding of what happens when a twentieth-century composition is being performed. He looks at the ways in which modern music has moved away from traditional ideas of, for example, form, tonality, harmony, rhythm, orchestration and notation. Through careful and detailed explanation of this evolution he illuminates the works of composers such as Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Bartok and many other musical innovators who have broken away from traditional formulae in their composition.

Genres: Music

329 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1995

About the author

Ottó Károlyi (born in Paris), having studied in Budapest, Vienna, and London, was a musicologist and the Senior Lecturer of Music at the University of Stirling, Scotland, where he founded the Music department and remained employed even after the department's closure. He died in October 2016.

Reviews

[Lobstergirl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Did you know that there is only one woman composer of modern music? It's true. Germaine Tailleferre, the female member of Les Six. She is mentioned only in passing here; none of her works are noted. Then there's Nadia Boulanger, but she's only mentioned as Aaron Copland's teacher, not as a composer. (She was also a composer.) She is one of five women mentioned in this book. The others are Emily Dickinson (whose poems were used by composer John Adams in the 1980s), Berthe Morisot (she painted some stuff), and Dame Edith Sitwell (her poems are rhythmically recited in a composition by William Walton).

This is just one of the things that makes this book seem earlier than its publish date of 1995. It has all sorts of musty attributes, from the staid writing style to the yellowed pages.

I haven't read many introductions to modern music, so maybe this is actually exemplary. Karolyi does do a decent job of explaining major ideas like tonality and atonality, serialism, and notation. Unfortunately the musical examples lack identifying captions, which are embedded in the text. Knowing a minimal amount of music theory will help a reader, although if you lack that you'll still be able to understand a fair amount.

My goal with books like these is always to track down the excerpts mentioned on Youtube and listen for the particular attributes being described. It takes days, or weeks. I'm off to listen to these men.