Unlike the eras before, music in the 20 th century was highly diversified since the composers had great creative freedom. To be more specific, supported by technological advancements, these composers were willing to take the bold step of experimenting with new music and also reinvented the music forms from the previous eras. Traditionally, music from the past eras was characterized by melody and harmony characteristics; however, in the 20th Century Modernism Era , music depended largely on rhythm, tone, texture, and color.
Regarding harmony , key features emerged to distinguish music in the 20th Century Modernism Era from the previous eras. For instance, this music uses the Pandiatonicism approach, which is using the diatonic scale without having a key central reference key. Likewise, this music lacked atonality. With the advancement in technologies, for instance, the use of magnetic tapes, composers could record sounds and later manipulated them in various ways. Thus, music no longer needed to follow the traditional structure based on melody and harmony.
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Other factors that influenced music change from the traditional eras were hostile political climates, which made the composers adopt the expressionism musical style. This form of music style had a high degree of dissonance, extreme pitches, appeared to have manipulated melodies and harmonies. This helped the composers to express and stress their deep emotions, criticizing the social vices of the politicians. Likewise, the availability of technology and media channels led to the commercialization of music. Consequently, the artists and the composers started to adopt visual media, where images would be manipulated to make it expressive in pushing for social changes. However, the use of visual media is blamed for the corruption of morals within societies.
