fontinau — 9 years ago(October 06, 2016 09:38 AM)
My attempt at a very basic summary of interesting new-ish classical music, posted on another forum earlier today. May everybody do with it what they will, which is probably nothing.
After the 1990s, I plead ignorance - either that or there just hasn't been anything very new since then (even if only in the same sense that there sort of wasn't anything very new between 1860 and 1894)
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but from the 1960s through the 1990s, it seems to me that the two new ideas that really mattered were minimalism (perhaps combined with just intonation, to which I think minimalist music may inherently tend) and spectralism, so here are some key works in those idioms:
Terry Riley - Shri Camel (1978)
also La Monte Young - "Map of 49's Dream" (1973) from
The Tortoise: His Dreams and Journeys
Gérard Grisey - Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil (1998)
There's also "extended techniques," which doesn't do much for me, but remains influential (not least on spectralism), so maybe there's something there.
Helmut Lachenmann - The Little Match Girl (1996)
For example, Rosie mentioned John Luther Adams, whose work I enjoy, but who seems to me to be essentially doing a picturesque version of Terry Riley (who is himself maybe basically a more pleasing version of La Monte Young), sometimes by way of Steve Reich (who is himself maybe basically early Riley with a beat and a more systematic technique).