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Index
Introduction
Preface
Chapter 1 Starting from Scratch
Music in the Aftermath of World War II; Zhdanovshchina, Darmstadt
A new age
Cold war
Denunciation and contrition
Breaking ranks
Zero hour
Polarization
Darmstadt
Fixations
“Total serialism”
Disquieting questions
Disquieting answers
Solace in ritual
Poster boy
Chapter 2 Indeterminacy
Cage and the “New York School”
Means and ends
Whose liberation?
Ne plus ultra (going as far as you can go)
Purification and its discontents
Permission
Music and politics revisited
Internalized conflict
Conflicts denied
New notations
Preserving the sacrosanct
Chapter 3 The Apex
Babbitt and Cold War Serialism
Conversions
“Mainstream” dodecaphony
The grand prize
The path to the new/old music
Requiem for a heavyweight
Academicism, American style
An integrated musical time/space
Full realization
Another cold war
Logical positivism
The new patronage and its fruits
Elites and their discontents
Life within the enclave
But can you hear it?
Ultimate realization or reductio ad absurdum?
Chapter 4 The Third Revolution
Music and Electronic Media; Varèse’s Career
Tape
An old dream come true
Generating synthetic sounds
A maximalist out of season
“Real” vs. “pure”
The new technology spreads
The big science phase
A happy ending
Big questions reopened
Reciprocity
Renaissance or co-option?
Chapter 5 Standoff (I)
Music in Society: Britten
History or society?
Some facts and figures
A modern hero
Social themes and leitmotives
Allegory (but of what?)
Exotic/erotic
To serve by challenging
Chapter 6 Standoff (II)
Music in History: Carter
Explain nothing
From populism to problem-solving: An American career
Theory: The Time Screen
Practice: The First Quartet
Reception
A wholly disinterested art?
At the pinnacle
Chapter 7 The Sixties
Changing Patterns of Consumption and the Challenge of Pop
What were they?
The music of youth
The British “invasion”
Defection
Rock’n’roll becomes rock
Fusion
Integration without prejudice?
Radical chic
Chapter 8 A Harmonious Avant-Garde?
Minimalism: Young, Riley, Reich, Glass; Their European Emulators
New sites of innovation
Legendary beginnings
Music as spiritual discipline
A contradiction in terms?
“Classical” minimalism
Secrets of structure
“All music is folk music”
A postmodernist masterwork?
“Crossover”: Who’s on top?
Disco at the Met
Americanization
Closing the spiritual circle
Chapter 9 After Everything
Postmodernism: Rochberg, Crumb, Lerdahl, Schnittke
Postmodernism?
Its beginnings for music
A parenthesis on collage
Collage as theater
Apostasy
Esthetics of pastiche
Accessibility
Cognitive constraints?
Where to go from here?
One proposal
The end of Soviet music
Polystylistics
Chapter 10 Millennium’s End
The Advent of Postliteracy: Partch, Monk, Anderson, Zorn; New Patterns of Patronage
Grand old men
Terminal complexity
“Big science” eclipsed
Twentieth-century “orality”
Hobo origins
Imaginary folklore
A feminine redoubt
Music and computers
The elite phase
Spectralism
“Then along came MIDI!”
First fruits
Modernists in postmodernist clothing?
A glimpse of the future?
Back to nature
Paying the piper, calling the tune
A new topicality
A new spirituality
Notes
Art Credits
Further Reading
Index
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