Modern era

Before the Second World War, Expressionism had levelled the musical playing field by declaring all 12 pitches of the chromatic scale equal. After the war, European musicians soon began to think about how to organise the other parameters of music. In the 1940s and 1950s, the Darmstadt School explored the issues raised by modernism. The result was serialism, where all musical parameters, not just pitches, were organised according to a pre-determined order. In contrast and as a reaction to this strict pre-determination, aleatorics gave performers the option to choose their material and how to perform it, thus influencing the end result. Reactions to the modernity and utter complexity of some contemporary music resulted in the birth of minimalism and Neo-Classicism, which drew on simplicity and traditional musical forms. As technology evolved, electronic music and spectral music emerged. Musical thinking expanded from individual notes to fields and to extra-musical phenomena such as noise. Microintervals were introduced. This proliferation of approaches and techniques means that it is no longer possible to codify universal rules for music.