New developments in the world of music:

Tonality, once so key to the development of compositions, has now all but been forsaken by a great many of the leading composers. This is maybe one of the more radical revolts in music, as certain "atonal" composers aim to keep the music from settling in a single key. One of the more well known techniques used to achieve this is what is known as the twelve-tone method. (Before explaining this, keep in mind that there are a total of twelve tones in the normal Western scale if you include the appropriate sharps and flats. Having said that...) The twelve-tone method consists arranging all twelve tones in any set order of the composer's choosing. The composer then follows this tone sequence (or some very similar variation of it) by continually changing the key of to the appropriate tone. Not only does this create the desired effect of leaving the overall key undefined, but at the same time adds some coherency and order to what would otherwise be a very haphazard style. On the other end of the scale is polytonality, which (as its name implies) is the simultaneous use of two or more keys in a single expanse of music.

Seeing as how we know live in the Computer Age, it was inevitable that these new technologies would somehow find their way into the world of music, and it did just that in a musical style that has come to be known as musique concrete (French for "concrete music," an obvious pun on "concrete poetry"). In essence the style involves the used of electronic equipment, particularly computers, to record and generate various sounds, warp them, and combine them to create musical elements. This technique was first adopted by the French engineer and composer Pierre Schaeffer in 1948, and by the 1960s various studios worldwide were set for such a use.

Finally, in the oddest of all musical innovations, some composers have resorted to what they have dubbed "indeterminacy"...in essence, it is the dependence on utter chance to create music. A composer writing in this style might pick his sets of notes using dice or random number generators, or create several pages of music that the musician can play in any page order he pleases. Some composers don't even go so far as to write music (well, not in the traditional sense, anyway). Instead of writing with standard musical notation, he might draw a series of geometric patterns or pictures, leaving the musician to interpret the "notes" as he/she sees fit.

Although the wide-spanning nature of modern Classical music has left very little room for generalization, there is one defining characteristic that seems apparent in most works. That would be the newly-found interest in sound tone and texture; in recent years, the "feel" of the music has come to take precedence over the traditional key elements of music. For the first time in musical history, the tone of individual notes seems to receive all the attention, while melody and harmony might be described, at best, as scanty.