In Monday’s (7/11) Slate, composer Jan Swafford ponders “yet again, in a new decade of a still-new century, the state of more or less ‘contemporary’ classical music, the state of noisy music, et al. … Noting that in the modern world hot new trends tend to linger on over the decades, what are the newer directions in contemporary music these days, and what shall we call them? I’ll nominate three leading trends. The first has a generally agreed upon title that is technical rather than descriptive: spectralism. … A composer pores over computer images of spectra, the acoustic waveforms that give sounds their colors. … Using computer analysis, the composer can then shape pieces around the unfolding of tone colors in a sort of, um, you know … scientific way or whatever. Our other two current trends are nicely complementary, one aggressively noisy and the other aggressively pleasant. For the noisy sort, I propose the genre aesthetic brutalism. … Finally there is a new generation of composers who have fled as far as possible from the old avant-garde and offer the public a warm, fuzzy embrace. Composer Andy Vores has dubbed this aesthetic the new niceness. … New niceness made the map definitively last year when Jennifer Higdon’s mellifluous Violin Concerto won the Pulitzer Prize.”
Posted July 14, 2011
