Has education expanded your listening tastes?

"You guys all seem to be well versed in classical music, so can anyone explain the DIFFERENCE between the old stuff and 20th Century Classical music. Why does it sound different. What changed?"

I'll take a stab.

CLassical music prior to 20th century was more melodic and towards the end of that era richly romantic as well.

Classical music of the 20th century is a direct reflection of the great social upheavals and turmoil of the times in Europe, represented at its climax by the two world wars. In many ways,classical music of the 20th century preceeeded other popular forms like rock music in terms of providing an outlet for a lot of the angst and chaos experienced by many. Themes like atonal music arose early on. Then as other popular forms came onto the scene, other themes like minimalism got a certain amount of attention as a response to all the new and more daring forms that abounded.

No trend lasts forever. Music is always in the process of re-inventing itself in ways that continue to enable it to play as the "soundtrack" of peoples lives.

World music, and all the diversity that comes along with that, seems to be where things are heading at this point.

Will there be new kind of "global symphony" to go along with the new "global economy"?

Looking at the changes in visual art over that time period will give some indication of the changes in music as well.

Mapman:

Your response sounds right to me. I remember that a lot of Artist, Musicians, Poets and Writers, actually fought in the First world war. And some died. That war had a tremendous impact on Europe that is not appreciated today. And all the causes of the second world war began in the first world war.

And of course the most Influential Music Critic of all time, Stalin, shaped music in Russia / Soviet Union. A bad review there could be fatal!! One man changed the course of music???

Thanks for the input.

Cheers

Mapman, Your question "What changed" is a great question, but change didn't occur abruptly at the end of the 19th century as an unprecedented phenomenon. Change, even change in music, is relentless.
The audience changed, beginning in the late 18th century, shifting from the clergy and the nobility to increasingly include the merchant class. The venue changed from the elector's palace to the city's music hall. The practice of one performance per piece changed to one where the major composers had their works published, printed, and widely distributed. The works enjoyed multiple performances across Europe. LvB's 3rd symphony was worlds apart from Haydn's 10th not just in in structure, scope, and content, but also in terms of its receiving audience. Haydn's early symphonies could afford to be more formulaic than LvB's. Beethoven also had music critics to deal with. LvB had to do something new with each subsequent symphony. With the turn of the 20th century, this pressure became that much more pronounced as recorded and broadcasted music came on the scene.
Music had to change, and the change had to accelerate and become more radical. Stravinsky was going to go nowhere if he produced a 4 movement symphony in the style of Brahms.
It could be argued that the rate of change has accelerated. The baroque period is generally recognized as lasting 150 years. Bach continued producing Baroque works 25 years after everyone else had stopped. There were a few guys who continued to write romantic pieces into the 20th century. Not many people would recognize their names, apart from Richard Strauss and Rachmaninov, perhaps.

Another question is why was the change not as monolithic as it was at other periods? The passing of the romantic genre was not followed by emergence of a single predominant new genre. I suspect that this is because Mahler, Brahms, Dvorak etc were hard acts to follow. Their music was the end of a road. The road did not extend.

Now is the time to call in Frogman for an expert opinion.

I've read where the public response at the time to bombastic new compositons from Shoenberg, Stravinsky and such early in the 20th century were the first public signs of teh phenomenon that eventually lead to rock and roll, which followed in the same revolutionary footsteps and registered with the masses at first in similar ways.