Musical forms

New forms were developed while many traditional forms continued to thrive.

Traditional forms

New forms

• Serial music: music that uses the Tone Row [Tone Row: A series of notes using all 12 notes from the chromatic scale. ].
• Microtonal music: music composed using tones smaller than a semitone.
• Minimalist music: music in which phrases are repeated over and over, with small changes introduced one by one.
• Neo-Classical: music which uses much dissonance [Dissonance: Two or more notes that when played together create a discord, or a jarring sound. ] and less feeling of key - developed by composers such as Stravinsky and Batok who wanted to move away from the emotion of Romanticism.
• Aleatoric music is the music of chance applied to many works written after WWII. Composers using this technique include Cage, Lutoslavski, Stockhausen and Xenakis. Often the actual musical material is pre determined but it is the performers who decide which sections are played in which order.