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In summary, Satie deserves the credit for being the true "father of modern
music". A list of his musical innovations (with examples) that were to
have profound consequences for modern music includes:



• objective, detached,
  unemotional musical aesthetic, Sarabandes, 1887
• non-Wagnerian aesthetic, Sarabandes,
  1887
• furniture music (pre-Muzak): musique d'ameublement,
  1920
• minimalism (proto-minimalism): Vexations,
  1883
• unbarred, unmeasured, ametric music (unused
  since the Renaissance), Le Fils des Etoiles, 1891
• quartal chords: Le Fils des Etoiles, 1891
• planing of sevenths, ninths, tritones, as
  well as fourths and fifths
• unresolved chords of sevenths and ninths:
  Sarabandes, 1887, Gymnopedies, 1888
• retrogressions used to nullify key
• atonality, Le Fils des Etoiles, 1891
• use of modes and "synthetic" scales,
  Gnossienes, 1890
• unresolved melodic tritones, Le
  Fils des Etoiles, 1891
• polychords, Le Fils des Etoiles, 1891
• proto-polytonality, Le Fils des Etoiles,
  1891
• monophony and monody, Le Fils des Etoiles,
  1891
• embracing of popular styles and cabaret music,
  3 Morceaux en Form de Poire, 1903.

Other Satie innovations include minimalism and furniture music. Musique
d'ameublement comprises a group of several pieces written about
1920. It is a precursor of Muzak, music that is meant to be ignored, i.e., background
music. In a conversation with Fernand Leger, Satie commented:

You know, there's a need to create furniture music;
that is to say, music that would be a part of the surrounding noises and that
would take them into account. I see it as melodious, as masking the clatter
of knives and forks without drowning it completely, without imposing itself.
It would spare them the usual banalities. Moreover, it would neutralize the
street noises that indiscreetly force themselves into the picture.[6]

During the first performance of musique d'ameublement
the audience sat silently, listening intently, but Satie became irritated, got
up and admonished the audience with "No, no! Talk, walk around, pay no
attention, don't listen."

Kandinsky and Music

"Kandinsky's special understanding of the affinities between painting and music and his belief in the Gesamtkunstwerk, or the total work of art, came forth in his text "On Stage Composition," his play "Yellow Sound," and his portfolio of prose poems and prints Klange (Sounds, 1913). Music can respond and appeal directly to the artist's "internal element" and express spiritual values, thus for Kandinsky it is a more advanced art. In his writings Kandinsky emphasizes this superiority in advancing toward what he calls the epoch of the great spiritual.

Ever since the Baroque Period, almost all
music had been written in one of two kinds of scales: major or minor.
By the end of the Romantic Period, however,
these scale systems were growing tired. The increasingly intense
emotions of the time could not be captured by using just the seven
availible tones of a given key. Increasingly, composers began to use
notes from the chromatic scale to create a greater sense of
emotion and tension.

The chromatic scale includes all 12 tones of the octave, whereas the
major and minor scales only use seven of the twelve. By using the
tones that are not "supposed" to be in a certain key, composers were
able to create stronger and more effective dissonances. In turn, the
exaggered dissonance created more tension, which gave a greater sense
of relief when the music arrived at a moment of release. Alternatively,
the moment of release could be delayed using chromatic harmonies, so
that the listener is constantly pulled forward, waiting for the
resolution. This can be heard in the operas of Richard Wagner, where
the melodies seem to drag on forever.

As composers used more and more chromatic tones, the sense of key was
gradually weakened. This is because the old tonal system was designed
to gravitate around its key center. Chromaticism served to dilute this
effect with the added "outside" notes. Eventually, this lack of tonal
focus grew to the point of atonality,
where there was no longer any indentifiable tonal center.

Term invented by Paul Signac to describe the Neo-Impressionist separation of colour into dots or patches applied directly to the canvas. Following the rules of colour-contrasts laid out by Ogden Rood and Michel-Eugène Chevreul, this method was intended to produce maximum brilliance scientifically and to avoid the muddiness caused by physically mixing colours before applying them to the canvas. Seen close to, a Divisionist canvas is a mass of contrasting dots: at a distance, the colours enhance each other to produce an effect of shimmering luminosity. Divisionism refers to the general principle of the separation of colour, unlike the term POINTILLISM, which refers specifically to the use of dots. Employed in France by members of the Neo-Impressionist group, Divisionism was also popular in Belgium among Les XX and in the Netherlands. In Italy the use of Divisionism, stimulated by Vitorio Grubicy, characterizes the advanced experiments of such painters as Angelo Morbelli, Giovanni Segantini, Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, Gaetano Previati and Plino Nomelli; a Divisionist phase also marked the early works of the Futurist artists Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, Carlo Carrà and Gino Severini, among others.