Music: Classical Music in Focus: The Twentieth Century

Course Programme (may be subject to some modification)

1. Breaking with the Past: Varieties of Modernism 

This class will present the central ideas that will run through much of the rest of the course: the idea that, whatever a composer does, it must be a break with what has gone before, and introducing the idea of ‘atonality’ as a marker of musical progress. We will discuss the roots of this idea in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries before showing how it was expressed in the twentieth century, drawing on German Expressionism from the 1900s and 1910s as a particular example.

2. High/Low Divides 

In contrast with the narrative of ‘atonality’ from the first class, the second class discusses the way in which composers drew on popular styles to inform their music as part of a different idea of ‘progress’. The use of jazz in France and the US in the 1910s and 1920s is an important example, though we will also discuss the various folk-song movements across Europe as well, as well as making reference to some of the composers who responded to pop and rock music later in the century. 

3. Complexity

Coming back to the story of atonality from Class 1, here we look at composers who developed extremely complex systems for creating music and whose music reflects that approach. These composers formed part of the increasing post-WW2 movement towards an academic, university-based understanding of musical creation. This class will discuss a number of members of the Darmstadt school, as well as composers who took those ideas into the American university system such Elliott Carter and Milton Babbitt.

4. Simplicity

This class is the counterpoint to the one from the previous week, looking at the composers who reacted against ideas of complexity. We will see how their attempts to strip music back or develop less emotional forms of expression responded to a variety of cultural and historical contexts. We will start with post-WW1 neoclassicism, and work our way through to various post-WW2 artistic movements such as minimalism. 

5. Music as Component

Here we will explore the ways in which ideas of progress and modernity impacted on the perceptions of various interdisciplinary genres, especially opera and ballet. As we will see, some of these forms worked at developing a progressive identity (some more successfully than others), with examples drawn from across Europe and the US. However, we can also see the emergence of a whole range of new multimodal products, such as film, television and video games, which all raise key questions regarding their interaction with classical music.

6. Music for the People

This class will look at the various movements across Europe and the US that aimed to create music that would be enjoyable by “the common people”, encompassing both capitalist and socialist contexts. Treading a fine line between the simplicity and complexity of the earlier two classes, composers as diverse as William Grant Still, Benjamin Britten, and Dmitri Shostakovich found various solutions to the issue of how the make art music accessible, inflected by the particular national politics around them.

7. Spiritual Dimensions

Rather than looking at a style in itself, this class instead explores the composers who took particular emotional approaches to creating music, with the high and low intensity versions united by certain ideas about music’s spiritual dimension. We will see how music by Kaikosru Sorabji and Olivier Messiaen on the one hand and the American Minimalist school on the other lent themselves well to crossovers between Eastern and Western ideas and between spiritualism and more mainstream religions.

8. Experimental Music

Here we will explore a particularly important thread, running through much of the century, of composers who challenged various conventions associated with music, blurring the lines one what counts as a piece, what counts as music, what counts as performance, etc. Discussing the work of Eric Satie, John Cage and members of the Fluxus group, this class will start to bring together various elements from the rest of the course.

9. Music and Technology

Running alongside the idea of musical experiment, the technology that increasingly made it possible is the subject of this class. Continuing from the previous week in bringing together the threads of the course, here we will look at all the forms of recording, broadcasting, and generating completely new sounds that composers used as part of both personal and institutional contexts. The we will also discuss the impacts that technologies have had on the work of performers, and on the diversity of music history more generally.

10. Playing with the Past? Varieties of Postmodernism 

The final class reflects on some of the ideas of modernity and ‘progress’ that have been discussed throughout the course, and turns to some the composers who (arguably) started to move beyond them towards the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Exploring the various different pathways that music might take from the playful to the progressive, we’ll see that some aspects of modernist thought were never seriously challenged, especially on the issue of originality. We’ll finish with a range of questions about where classical music will go for the future.

There is no compulsory reading required for this course, and there is no set course text.

Dr Bruno Bower is a lively and enthusiastic tutor whose love of music is infectious. He is a musicologist, performer, composer, and music editor, as well as a highly experienced teacher. He has taught at Cambridge University, University of Surrey, Brunel University, and the Royal College of Music, and his innovative teaching methods have been recognised by Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy. Alongside his courses at Imperial, he currently teaches at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. 

He has written and presented on subjects as diverse as Gilbert and Sullivan, John Cage, and Victorian polymaths, and he is the General Editor for critical editions of music by Peter Gellhorn and Norman O’Neill, as well as editorial consultant on the AHRC-funded ‘Music, Migration and Mobility’ project at the RCM. He is also the principal oboist of West London Sinfonia and the cor anglais player for Chelsea Opera Group.

Rate Categories and Discounts

Standard Rate

• Available to all except those who fall under the Internal Rate or Associate Rate category, respectively.

Internal Rate

• Current Imperial College students and staff (incl. Imperial NHS Trust, Imperial Innovations, ancillary & service staff employed on long-term contracts at Imperial College by third-party contractors)
• People enrolling under our Friends & Family scheme
• Alumni of Imperial College and predecessor colleges and institutes
• Students, staff and alumni of the Royal College of Art and Royal College of Music
• Students, staff and Governors of Woodhouse College and the IC Mathematics School

Associate Rate

• Austrian Cultural Forum staff
• City & Guilds College Association members
• Co-operative College members
• Francis Crick Institute staff, researchers and students
• Friends and Patrons of the English Chamber Orchestra
• Friends of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens
• Friends of Leighton House/ Sambourne House
• Friends of the Royal College of Music
• Harrods staff
• Historic Royal Palaces staff
• Lycee Charles de Gaulle staff
• Members of the Friends of Imperial College
• Members of the Kennel Club
• Members of the London Zoological Society
• Members of the South London Botanical Institute (SLBI)
• Members of the UK Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP)
• National Health Service (NHS) employees
• Natural History Museum staff
• Residents of postcodes SW3, SW5, SW7, SW10 and W8
• Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Council staff
• Royal College of Art and Royal College of Music tutors and other staff
• Royal Geographical Society staff
• Science Museum staff
• Staff of Exhibition Road Cultural Group (Discover South Kensington) organisations
• Students (non-Imperial College)
• Teachers and other staff of UK schools
• Tutors and other staff of institution members of the Association of Colleges
• Tutors and other staff of other universities and higher education institutions
• Victoria and Albert Museum staff

Late enrolment

It is possible to enrol on many of our adult education courses after the course has already started. For non-language courses this is subject entirely to agreement by the tutor. For language courses it is subject to agreement by the language coordinator conducting level assessment. If you want to join a course late do bear in mind there might be work you will need to catch up on, particularly in language courses.

Friends and Family Scheme

This course is eligible for the  allowing Imperial College students and staff to share their discount with their friends and family.

Web enrolment opens on 1st March 2023

Enrolment and payment run through the Imperial College eStore. When enrolling:

• Do check on the drop down menu above called "Course Fees and Rate Categories" to see if you are eligible for a discounted rate and also do make sure you select that rate when enrolling on the eStore
• If you are a first-time eStore user you will need to create an account before enrolling. You can do this by entering an email address and password. This account can then be used for any future enrolments via the eStore.

When you have enrolled you will be sent the following email notifications:

If you have any questions about the academic content or teaching of this course please contact the Course Tutor, Dr Bruno Bower, b.bower@imperial.ac.uk

If you have any questions about your enrolment or payment processes please contact the Programme Administrator, Christian Jacobi, eveningclass@imperial.ac.uk