Superabundance

Thanks to developments in particle physics, astronomy, and genetics, as well as international travel, finance, and communication the cultural horizon of the 21st century is acquainted with both the immensely large and the sub-atomically small. Composers responded to this new imaginative horizon with works that express both extremes of scale, and of superabundant resources and extravagance. This chapter considers these responses in a number of ways, from the musicircus-type spectacles of Lisa Bielawa and Alvin Curran to the electroacoustic microsound compositions of Horacio Vaggione and Barry Truax, from Glen Branca’s massed guitars to Pierre Boulez’s proliferating elaborations, and from Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf’s complexism to the extrahuman augmentations of the electronic music studio.

Mediation and The Marketplace

Providing first a comprehensive history of spiritual minimalism– the extraordinarily successful phenomenon that made unlikely stars of Henryk Górecki, Arvo Pärt, and John Tavener in the early 1990s–this chapter makes the case that by the end of the 20th century new music had entered into a new and transformative relationship with the media and the commercial market, through new listening practices such as soundtracking, and through marketing towards new audiences. This is supported by discussions of composers and collectives that have particularly engaged with these, including Bang on a Can, Nonclassical and, in particular, Edition Wandelweiser.

Fluidity

The Internet and digital technology have given rise not only to new genres of music, but also new ways of using and thinking about musical material and form. Using as a guide Nicolas Bourriaud’s writings on contemporary art–especially The Radicant–this chapter considers how digitization has affected compositional aesthetics from the transcriptions of Peter Ablinger and translations of Olga Neuwirth, to disembodiment in the music of Stefan Prins and the journey forms of Jennifer Walshe.

Recovery

Beginning with the historical rupture created by the fall of the Berlin Wall, this chapter considers the presence of the past in contemporary music. Looking first at the situation of composers in the recently erased GDR, it moves outwards to consider modes of nostalgia, reflection, and defiance in music from across the former Soviet Union, and then modes of musical restoration and recomposition in music from Thomas Adès to Isabel Mundry, and finally in forms of postproduction in music by Bernhard Lang and others. Considering, last of all, two major works by Chaya Czernowin the chapter concludes with a summation of the whole book within a theory of afterness; that is, a reconsideration of figure and ground as sequential, rather than simultaneous.

Loss

The consequences of modernity and postmodernity have included the destruction of habitats and communities, as well as threats to national and personal security. Considerations of the environment, millennial anxieties, and new forms of contemporary tragedy have brought new means of articulating and recording loss in music. The chapter considers in particular modes of documentation and preservation as responses to loss, especially in forms of acoustic ecology and field recording; as well as forms of musical ruins. It also considers works of public and private commemoration, in musical responses to both 9/11 and AIDS.

Permission

The rise of the “New Musicology” in the 1980s coincided with a rise in social liberalizations, and their counter-response in the form of the Bush-era “culture wars.” Together they sparked a renewed interest in the listening and performing body, and in musical affect, explored here in composers’ uses of noise, silence, tonality, and meter, from Diamanda Galás to Laurence Crane, Masonna to Michael Torke. Such freedoms were also extended to the mixing of genres, and art music’s crossovers with electronica and indie rock are also discussed, as well as the further challenges to the Romantic concept of Werktreue to which these have given rise.

Mobility

Globalization has increased opportunities for international exchange and cooperation, as well as exploitation and conflict. This chapter approaches the contemporary music ecosystem through the concept of mobility–of ideas, sounds, and musicians–around the world. It considers cultural hybridity as exemplified by the Silk Road Ensemble, transnational embodiment in composer-performers from Tarek Atoui to Pamela Z, the role of institutions and funding bodies in shaping global flows, the meaning of Western music outside the West, networked music created for the Internet, and varieties of cultural opacity and relatedness expressed in music by Liza Lim and Michael Finnissy.

1989 and After

Beginning with examples by Steve Reich, Galina Ustvolskaya, Merzbow, Hildegard Westerkamp, and Bright Sheng, this chapter introduces the diversity of composition being produced at the end of the 1980s and explains the need for a new form of music history that can reflect and organize that variety. It provides a rationale for 1989 as a starting point for that history and describes six main developments in society, culture, and technology that have enabled and inspired developments in Western art music since then: social liberalization, globalization, digitization, the Internet, late capitalist economics, and the green movement.