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• Arts & Culture
• Classical
• Modern Era

including literature and the visual arts as well as music. The main force behind the movement was the Italian writer Filippo Marinetti, who published the definitive manifesto of the Futurists in 1909. With declared enthusiasm for modernity and new inventions, such as the motor car, it is not surprising that the movement’s members would experiment with electronic music. ...

• Instruments
• Classical
• Modern Era

A notable entry into the field of electronic music was made by Luigi Russolo and Ugo Piatti. Members of the Futurist movement, they developed a family of machines called ‘noise-intoners’. One of these contained a wheel with a rosined or toothed circumference, which could be brought into contact with a string, whose tension could be varied and which ...

• Instruments
• Percussion

In the twentieth century, some musicians became interested in inventing new acoustic instruments that could take music beyond the tuning systems, scales and harmonic language inherent in the instruments commonly played in western classical music. Creating new instruments created a revolutionary new sound world. New instruments were often promoted outside the normal scope of the bourgeois concert audience, ...

• Electronic

Unlike rock music, electronic music is made partly or wholly using electronic equipment – tape machines, synthesizers, keyboards, sequencers, drum machines and computer programmes. Its origins can be found in the middle of the nineteenth century, when many of electronic music’s theories and processes were conceived. In 1863 German scientist Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz ...

• Styles & Forms
• Electro
• Electronic

Electro is currently enjoying a huge renaissance, but, despite the current hype and mainstream acceptance of the music, it has always enjoyed a strong cult following. This is due to the music’s many different strands and its constant need for reinvention. At its most basic level, electro differentiates itself from house and techno by the fact that ...

• Styles & Forms
• Electronic
• New Age

New age music has become the most popular form of contemporary electronic music. Unlike the other variants, new age has become popular with a global mainstream audience, even more so than the most commercial strains of contemporary chill out. Although similarities do exist between new age and ambient music – both styles were influenced by the same pioneers, ...

• Styles & Forms
• New Romantics & Futurism
• Pop

Born out of a reaction to both punk and 2-Tone’s politics and anti-star stance, the British synth-pop wave of the early 1980s brought almost instant change to the UK pop scene. Moreover, the US success of the principal protagonists signalled the biggest ‘British Invasion’ since The Beatles and The Rolling Stones transformed American pop in the 1960s. Mixing a ...

• Classical
• Modern Era

The Modern Age was characterized by rapid and radical change and political turmoil. By 1918 the Russian tsar, the Habsburg emperor and the German kaiser had lost their thrones. The two Russian revolutions of 1917 resulted in a Communist government led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was fragmented to allow self-determination to the newly formed countries of Czechoslovakia ...

• Styles & Forms
• Classical
• Modern Era

scope for innovation in the chromatic scale and the sonorities of traditional instruments, others felt the need to move beyond both. The first manifesto in 1910 of the Italian Futurists, whose movement encompassed artists and writers as well as musicians, called for music to be invaded by the sounds of modern industrial society, of factories, trains ...

• Arts & Culture
• Classical
• Modern Era

(such as the use of a rapidly repeated note or a string tremolando) might animate the surface. Styles & Forms | Modern Era | Classical Arts & Culture | The Futurists | Modern Era | Classical ...