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Like Western art history, western music history can be seen as a development from ancient classical roots, with input from various other traditions along the way. From the Renaissance and well into the 19th century, this development produced and refined a classical canon of writing and hearing music. Elements of melody, harmony, and counterpoint, of rhythm, dynamics and compositional structure, were all elaborately developed in a vital tradition of musical theory and practice. As with the visual arts, so with music; this development was shaped and accelerated by the invention of the fine art tradition, with its accompanying venues of the concert hall and the opera house, its broader listening public, and its emphasis on the composer (and sometimes the performer) as genius. The public performance of musical compositions, especially of purely instrumental music, that were meant to be listened to for their own sake, made it possible to develop much longer and more complex forms, and to write some very profound music that would not otherwise have been possible, even while it also began to restrict the audiences who could appreciate it and to intensify the separation between music for everyday life and "serious" or fine-art music. Throughout this history, new developments challenged old ones, so that both musicians and the listening public could react with shock at what they were hearing. But the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century brought a much sharper departure from tradition than had any previous period. In other words, modernism was as strong in music as it was anywhere else in western culture. There was impressionism in music as there was in painting (Debussy, Ravel). Schoenberg wrote expresssionist pieces that could easily be compared to the expressionist paintings of Munch and others (e.g., Pierrot Lunaire). Other trends that were present in the visual arts and in literature were also present in music. The idea that music should be beautiful, or pleasant to listen to, took a back seat to the idea that it should be visionary or "sublime" in the Kantian sense. Composers made up their own formal conventions, most famously in the serialist or tone-row tradition begun by Schoenberg, Weber, and Berg, and still practiced rigorously by Berg. (In this music, the composer arranges the twelve tones of the chromatic scale in some order, usually not the traditional scale. The resulting series of notes, the tone-row, dictates the rest of the composition, since notes may only be used in that order. Some variations are allowed, such as playing the last half of the row before the first, or playing the row backwards or upside-down; but everything comes back to the order of the row).
Almost a mirror image of this formalist approach is the chance or aleatory music of composers like John Cage. Cage introduced chance into his pieces in many ways. He would generate a string of random numbers, and use them to tune several different radios on stage. One famous piece has the performer sit at the piano bench for exactly 4 minutes and 33 seconds, turning pages from time to time but playing nothing; the music is the random collection of noises that fills the hall as cars drive by outside, while patrons clear their throats, shift in their chairs, or start audibly complaining about spending money for the performance.
The minimalism of Steve Reich and Philip Glass is neither random nor arbitrarily structured. At first it is easier on the traditionally trained ear, though quickly enough it becomes evident that it is not traditional music. It has much in common with the abstraction of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, with which it shares a spiritual sensibility shaped by meditation. In another cross-over from classical to popular, minimalist music is a major source for "trance" music.
Again as with the visual arts, contemporary "classical" music is in a period of pluralism. The expectation that one style must be the right one has become ridiculous. Rather, a wide variety of styles are all accepted. Among these are a neo-classical style (Bernstein, Barber, Copland) that returns to traditional harmonies, structures and methods, while continuing to make use of the dissonances and surprises that modern music introduced. Other noteworthy trends include a vigorous interaction between western and other musical traditions, and a breaking down of the lines between fine art music and popular forms (jazz, blues, rock and roll, gospel, and the traditional musics of many cultures). Electronic techniques for sampling and transforming sounds were used by modern composers almost as soon as they became available, and they continue to be important in all genres of contemporary music. Finally, sensitivity to the natural environment is a central theme of much contemporary music, and informs both methods and content in a variety of ways (e.g., inclusion of whale song in symphonies).
This has been a short story about the development of Western music. There are many other musical traditions outside the west. Some of them are primarily traditions of directly accessible music for rituals, dances, celebrations, and story-telling. Others have a sophisticated and complex history, with a parallel development of theories to go with the music. (The Indian raga tradition is an example.)
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