Innovative Processes in 20th-Century Music: from the Avant-Garde to the Digitization of Music

The musical art of the twentieth century is characterized by the rapid evolution of styles, genres, and expressive means, inspired by the development of technology, including in the field of sound recording and electronic musical instruments. The purpose of this paper is to provide a generalized overview of the innovations that appeared in music during the twentieth century and determined its stylistic diversity. The research methodology is based on an empirical approach that includes the analysis of musicological literature and the analysis of scores by composers from different countries who worked in different musical genres and made the greatest contribution to the introduction of the latest compositional techniques. It has been found that innovations in the music of the twentieth century affect the timbral palette and peculiarities of the pitch organization of the musical fabric. The renewal of timbral diversity is primarily associated with the development of electronic sound synthesis, which opens opportunities for generating sounds inaccessible to acoustic musical instruments. By the end of the twentieth century, special synthetic sounds became the basis of electronic dance music, such as techno and house. Innovative methods of pitch organization refer to composers' searches aimed at expanding or introducing alternatives to the classical tonal system. Such alternatives include modality, serial technique, and microintervals. These updates concern not only the author's material, but also the methods of composer's work with folk music - the combination of folk melodies with innovative harmonic and timbral solutions became the basis of neo-folklorism.