If you speak with casual fans of classical music, whether at a concert or a party, you tend to hear something similar: They love this art form, but they don’t really like “the new stuff.”
Ask them to explain what they mean, and the answers will vary. But it’s common to hear that contemporary music lacks melody or sounds atonal. Listeners can feel that there isn’t an easy way in, or anything to hold onto.
That description may fit some pieces composed today, but it more accurately describes much older music, like Pierre Boulez’s “Le Marteau Sans Maître,” a masterpiece of musical modernism that premiered 70 years ago. It’s not to everyone’s taste, and it doesn’t have to be. But if there’s any point to agree on, it’s that works from the time of “Le Marteau” aren’t contemporary enough to qualify as “the new stuff.”
So why, in the popular imagination, does this style of iconoclastic avant-gardism endure as contemporary music writ large? Especially when the music of today has no definitive sound?
We live in an age with no musical orthodoxy or hegemony. There may be trends, such as explorations of identity through sound, but there is no governing style, or any all-powerful gatekeepers. Missy Mazzoli’s “Dark With Excessive Bright,” an acoustic score influenced by centuries of music history, is just as broadly “contemporary” as Annea Lockwood’s “A Sound Map of the Danube,” a collage made of field recordings.
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