Contemporary Music

This collection of essays and interviews addresses important theoretical, philosophical and creative issues in Western art music at the end of the twentieth- and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries. The book offers a wide range of international perspectives from prominent musicologists, philosophers and composers. Part I is mainly theoretical in emphasis. Issues addressed include the historical rationalization of music and technology, new approaches to the theorization of atonal harmony in the wake of Spectralism, debates on the 'new complexity', the heterogeneity, pluralism and stylistic omnivorousness that characterizes music in our time, and the characterization of twentieth-century and contemporary music as a 'search for lost harmony'. The orientation of Part II is mainly philosophical, examining concepts of totality and inclusivity in new music. Part III offers creative perspectives, with new essays and interviews from important contemporary composers. A concluding essay by Alastair Williams provides a postlude to the book, while the whole collection is prefaced by an extended introductory chapter by Max Paddison which provides a context of ideas, and traces many of the issues discussed back to Adorno's seminal notion of une musique informelle.

Max Paddison is Professor of Music Aesthetics, Department of Music, University of Durham, UK. He is the author of Adorno's Aesthetics of Music and Adorno, Modernism and Mass Culture. Irène Deliège, University of Liège, Belgium, is founding editor of the journal Musicae Scientiae and founding member of ESCOM, the European Society of the Cognitive Sciences of Music.

IntroductionContemporary Music: Theory, Aesthetics, Critical Theory; I: Theoretical Perspectives and Retrospectives; 1: The Principles of Music and the Rationalization of Theory 1; 2: Atonal Harmony: From Set to Scale; 3: In Search of Lost Harmony 1; 4: Against a Theory of Musical (New) Complexity 1; 5: Heterogeneity: Or, on the Choice of Being Omnivorous; 6: Varèse, Serialism and the Acoustic Metaphor; 7: 'I Open and Close'? 1; 8: A Period of Confrontation: The Post-Webern Years 1; II: Philosophical Critiques and Speculations After Adorno; 9: A Philosophy of Totality; 10: Possibilities for a Work-Immanent Contemporary Musical Logic; 11: Postmodernism and the Survival of the Avant-garde; 12: Material Constraints: Adorno, Benjamin, Arendt; 13: Towards an Aesthetics of Risk; 14: Music and Social Relations: Towards a Theory of Mediation; III: Creative Orientations; 15: Music, Ambiguity, Buddhism: A Composer's Perspective; 16: Artistic Orientations, Aesthetic Concepts, and the Limits of Explanation: An Interview with Pierre Boulez 1; 17: Failed Time, Successful Time, Shadowtime: An Interview with Brian Ferneyhough; 18: Sound Structures, Transformations, and Broken Magic:; 19: Hunting and Forms: An Interview with Wolfgang Rihm; Postlude:Helmut Lachenmann, Wolfgang Rihm and the Austro-German Tradition