Essay questions about chapters 30, 32, 33

1. What role did nationalism play during the second half of the nineteenth century in the formation of musical styles among composers in Europe, Russia, Britain and the United States? How did the role of nationalism differ in different regions? Did nationalism yield a single coherent musical style or a diversity of styles? Identify and describe compositions that illustrate the influence of nationalism on later-nineteenth-century music, and explain whether and how nationalist ideologies and aesthetics confer distinct stylistic traits on these works. 

2. Identify and explain some of the compositional techniques that modernist composers in the early twentieth century developed to replace traditional ideas of tonal progression and motivic development inherited from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Austro-German tradition.

3. Discuss ways in which composers in the early twentieth century confronted the challenge of writing music following what many of them thought to be the exhaustion of the expressive possibilities of traditional tonal music. Which composers offered important, compelling solutions to this challenge? What were these solutions? How did composers explain their rethinking or abandonment of previous conventions of tonality and musical expression? Identify and describe a variety of compositions that demonstrate the range of solutions that composers pursued.