New Complexity
Though often atonal, highly abstract, and dissonant in sound, New Complexity music is most readily characterized by the use of techniques which require complex musical notation. This includes extended techniques, complex and often unstable textures, microtonality, highly disjunct melodic contour, complex layered rhythms, abrupt changes in texture, and so on. It is also characterized, in contrast to the music of the immediate post–World War II serialists, by the frequent reliance of its composers on poetic conceptions, very often implied in the titles of individual works and work-cycles.