All Students preparing for Grade exams are recommended to use the Hofnotes on-line training pages to practise for the aural tests. 

At higher grades  you must be able to discuss with the examiner musical features such as texture, form, style, and period of a piece of music.  My own  web pages to help with these parts of the test at Grade 5+ and at GCSE are available here!

Twentieth century music 1900 - 2000

2oth century style

• Extremely diverse
• Explorations of modality and the pentatonic scale
• Expressionism An expressionist composition © R Harrison 2009
• Minimalism
• Atonality and serialism
• Still a great deal of tonal, neo-romantic music being written - examples being Kabalevsky, Shostakovitch, Elgar

2oth century forms

Tone poems and descriptive pieces

Expressionist work

Modernist and minimalist

Dissonance and atonality

2oth century instruments

Prepared piano

Invention of the synthesiser in 1960s

MIDI sequencers used increasingly from 1990s

2oth century composers

• George Gershwin
• Arnold Schoenberg
• Alban Berg
• Ygor Stravinsky
• Claude Debussy
• Maurice Ravel
• Bela Bartók
• George Gershwin
• John Cage
• Philip Glass

Last updated on: 03/01/2012