Music after the fall
Subtitle: modern composition and culture since 1989
By: Tim Rutherford-Johnson
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 348
ISBN-13: 9780520283145; 9780520283152
Subjects: History and criticism; Music; History
Description: This is the first book to survey contemporary Western art music within the transformed political, cultural, and technological environment of the post-Cold War era. In this book, Tim Rutherford-Johnson considers musical composition against this changed backdrop, placing it in the context of globalization, digitization, and new media. Drawing connections with the other arts, in particular visual art and architecture, he expands the definition of Western art music to include forms of composition, experimental music, sound art, and crossover work from across the spectrum, inside and beyond the concert hall. Each chapter is a critical consideration of a wide range of composers, performers, works, and institutions, and develops a broad and rich picture of the new music ecosystem, from North American string quartets to Lebanese improvisers, from electroacoustic music studios in South America to ruined pianos in the Australian outback. Rutherford-Johnson puts forth a new approach to the study of contemporary music that relies less on taxonomies of style and technique than on the comparison of different responses to common themes of permission, fluidity, excess, and loss.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: 1989 and after --; title: Mediation and the marketplace --; title: Permission: freedom, choice, and the body --; title: Fluidity: digital translations, displacements, and journeys --; title: Mobility: worldwide flows, networks, and archipelagos --; title: Superabundance: spectacle, scale, and excess --; title: Loss: ruins, memorials, and documents --; title: Recovery: gaps between past and present.