The major performing institutions of the 19th century have continued into the 21st century with only minimum structural change, except for a rather belated movement toward unionization of personnel; this development has of course improved the performers’ lot greatly, while increasing the costs of performance. Unquestionably, the major new influence on 20th-century music performance was electronics. Broadcasting and recording widened even further the potential audience for concert artists, at the same time as they tended to decrease the physical necessity for large new public performance arenas. Electronic instruments appeared, both amplified versions of older ones (guitar, piano, and even some woodwinds) and instruments with fundamentally electronic means of tone production (electronic pianos and organs, the theremin and Ondes Martenot, sound synthesizers, and still later developments). Other new compositional and performance possibilities also emerged—for example, film, tape, stereophonism, and computers. Even before the phonograph (invented c. 1875) had begun to be regarded as more than a toy, serious research into the authentic performance of older music had produced an awareness of possibilities that pointed the way out of late Romantic gigantism and subjectivism. From the very beginning of the 20th century, the chamber concerts given by Arnold Dolmetsch and his family, on reconstructions of old gambas and recorders, attracted attention to small ensembles and different sonorities and encouraged the activities of other artists.

The true end of the Romantic era and the beginning of the modern era can be dated from the second decade of the 20th century, the time of the composition of two masterpieces that more than any others mark the departure from 19th-century performance ideas: the German composer Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (1912) and the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky’s Histoire du soldat (1918; The Soldier’s Tale). These are chamber works, but their instrumental makeup is a unique mixture of instruments that do not necessarily blend and that seem further to repudiate the orchestra as a performing medium. Pierrot is a series of songs that repudiate the 19th-century lied: the voice does not sing but produces a kind of pitched speech (Sprechstimme). Histoire repudiates both orchestra and opera as previously understood: it is specifically (and inexpensively) designed for performance on a portable stage by three dancers, a narrator, and seven instrumentalists. For these works a new kind of performer was required, and these works in turn helped to train the new performer—who might be called the group-virtuoso. Teams or groups of such performers subsequently sprang up everywhere. Often centred on a living composer or the university where he or she taught, they essentially functioned as partners in the compositional process, realizing the work rather than interpreting it. Such performers were very much involved in the creative act, the product of which reflected their particular skills and personalities, and the dynamics of the working situation. Among the most influential composers of the 21st century has been John Adams, known for blending diverse musical genres—including jazz, pop, and electronic music—in his works as well as assembling vocal texts from popular media, government documents, personal interviews, and other sources.

Since the mid-20th century the established performance situation has moved from the formal, ritualized event of the past to a more informal and spontaneous type of gathering. The interaction of various media has led to new art forms and circumstances. Many artists have attempted to create performance situations that actively involve as participants all those in attendance. In such compositions, the roles of composer, performer, and listener are consolidated in a single participant, who in interaction with others arrives at an art work, which all have invented, realized, and perceived, and which can never take place in exactly the same way again. On the other hand, the ever-increasing use of technology has intensified the problem of evaluating the meaning and effect of electronically produced and assembled performances that, in their totality, never took place at all and possibly never could.

The electronic media continue to improve so that anyone may be able to select chamber, concert, opera, and other new types of performance from anywhere in the world, experiencing them through nearly lifelike reproduction facilities. Vast numbers of people may study performance skills via two-way transmission with great artists. The number of actual public performing events may decrease as private musical performance increases. Already there is the phenomenon of the widespread dissemination of great performers’ recordings, which has forced the standards of quality for a live performance to almost inhuman heights and has increased interest in the performance of older as well as contemporary music.

South Asia

Although classical South Asian or Indian musicians usually perform in a concert situation quite analogous to that of Western artists, their audiences respond to them quite differently: they are judged not on how faithfully they reproduce the music the composer imagined but on how well they create their own music within certain wide bounds set by the composer and by the general practice of Indian music. Since Indian musical performance is based on improvisation, Indian musical pedagogy is therefore a more personal procedure, in which aspiring musicians will “apprentice” themselves to a guru, with whom they are thereafter identified; in the West this kind of organization is reflected in the rise of the group-virtuoso discussed above. Similarly, Western development away from large performing groups such as the full orchestra reflects—or at least parallels—the more intimate character of Indian music, the basic texture of which usually involves a quite small group of performers: one player to provide rhythm on a drum such as the double-headed, pitched tabla; one to provide a basic drone, often on the lute-like tambura; and a central performer on the sitar (technically also a plucked lute but one with melodic capability, unlike the tambura). The players often engage in a kind of competition not unlike that of Western jazz groups. If there is singing, the style of performance is low and soft, in contrast to that of Indonesian classical vocalism.

Southeast Asia

The gamelan is at the centre of the art-music tradition of Indonesia. It may range in size from a few to more than 75 instruments. The basic melodic instrument is the saron (bronze xylophone), accompanied by various gongs, a kind of bowed lute, a recorder-flute and/or a zither; the group is led by a drummer. As in medieval Western music, there are two kinds of gamelan playing, one emphasizing the bronze instruments (comparable to medieval haut, or loud, consorts) and the other the wind and stringed instruments (bas, or soft, groups). A similar differentiation exists in Indochinese music in the contrast between the percussion-dominated pi phat band of Thailand and the string-dominated mahori bands of Thailand and Cambodia. Gamelan playing, particularly of the softer type, often accompanies solo and unison choral singing of classical poetry (music is connected with most of Indonesian literature). Southeast Asian vocal performance—like that of a great deal of non-Western art music—is characterized by tense, high, often nasal voice production; this is one of many alternatives explored by the more experimental 20th-century Western composers and performers.

China and Japan

The most extensively developed and most important Chinese and Japanese traditions of musical performance are closely tied to theatrical styles and traditions. Perhaps the most spectacular of non-Western performance traditions is Chinese opera, in which singers, acrobats, costumes, scenery, and instruments are combined in the creation of a highly varied work of art. Jingxi (Peking opera) uses two basic kinds of instrumentation: wuchang, for military scenes a battery of drums, gongs, and cymbals with a kind of oboe (suona) playing the melody; wenchang, for the more frequent domestic scenes a wider variety based on a drum (bangu) with a peculiarly sharp, cracking sound for keeping time, and a number of two-stringed bowed lutes (huqin, notably the jinghu) played with the bow passing between the strings. Plucked lutes (notably, the yueqin) and flutes (typically, the di) also appear at times. All of the melody instruments play heterophonically with the singers, whose vocal style, as in the West, is highly artificial. Heroines are usually portrayed (sometimes by female impersonators) in a high, thin voice; heroes use a raucous rasping tone quite foreign to traditionally oriented Western ears—but, again, not unlike some of the vocal techniques required by 20th-century Western avant-garde composers. A performance tradition peculiarly Japanese is the emphasis on the visual aspects of making music: custom directs that gagaku (court orchestra) instruments must be played as gracefully as possible.