Is there such a thing as 20th century music?

this is turning out to be a really hot topic of debate :-)

Any music made in the 20th century is 20th century music - so it must exist - the difference is that in the 20th century artists began to record their own music and there was the recording studio.

I think there would be some fantastic undiscovered gems if those facilities had been available in the 19th century - there were song wonderful songs written in Victorian times.

We could, of course, go further back - imagine John Dowland recording his own music - well I'm definitely on his list of customers.

I think that is what distinguishes the 20th century - perhaps the most innovative creator of musical sound in that century was the wonderful Delia Derbyshire - a true pioneer in the age of electronic music (she detested synthesisers by the way).

There were some very interesting composers too - Varese, comes to mind, Aaron Copland and my favourite composer: Leoš Janáček - Taras Bulba (1918), Sinfonietta (1926), The Makropoulos Affair (1926) - Leoš was prog-rock and way ahead of the rhythm and blues oriented rock that came to dominate 50s/60s music - he wrote music in the early 20th century that would become the most potent influence of the early 1970s and beyond. If a guy from out of space landed and asked me what was the meaning of life on earth and why do we bother trudging through each day doing ever more boring chores to scrape a living then I could just play him Sinfonietta and all would become clear; listening to something as powerful and beautiful as Sinfonietta makes everything worth-the-while.

ATB Rotf