Modern music refers to all Western music creations from the late 19th and early 20th centuries after the Impressionist school until today. The characteristics of modern music are the pursuit of exploration, pioneering and new ideas, especially free structure, peculiar rhythm, disharmonious harmonic language, complicated polytonality and atonality, and strangeness. The sound effects are often very stimulating; the above-mentioned novelty is not pursued by all composers. Some composers advocate the perfect combination of classical music with their own national style and modern composition techniques to create produce better musical works.

Due to the complexity of society, modern music schools naturally have many branches, such as expressionism music, twelve-tone music, neoclassical music, sequence music, accidental music, electronic music, collage music, event Music etc. I won’t go into details. Holst (1874-1934), British composer, representative work: "Planet" suite. Ives (1874-1954) was the most progressive and adventurous American amateur composer of his time. He often foreshadowed ideas that would come to other composers years later. He is not only recognized as America's first great composer, but also as a pioneer of the most progressive modern music. There are five symphonies, etc.