Contemporary Music Contemporary or post-modernity can be said to be a response to modernism which asserts that the products of human activity — particularly manufactured or created by artifice — are the central subject for art itself, and that the purpose of art is to focus people's attention on objects for contemplation, as composer-critic Steve Hicken explained it. This strain of modernism looks backward to the dada school of art exemplified by Duchamp, and to the collage of "concrete" music, as well as experiments with electronic music by Edgar Varèse and others. However, post-modernity asserted that this was the primary mode of human existence, an individual aswim in a sea of the products of people. John Cage is a prominent figure in 20th century music whose influence steadily grew during his lifetime, and who is regarded by many as the founder of post-modern music. Cage questioned the very definition of music in his pieces, and stressed a philosophy that all sounds are essentially music. Cage in the "silent" 4'33" presents the listener with his idea that the unintentional sounds are just as musically valid as the sounds originating from an instrument. Cage also notably used aleatoric music, and "found sounds" in order to create an interesting and different type of music. His music not only rested on his argument that there was no "music" or "noise" only "sound", and that combinations of found sound were musical events as well - but on the importance of focusing of attention and "framing" as essential to art. Cage, though, has been seen by some to be too avant-garde in his approach; for this reason, many find his music unappealing. Interestingly, the seeming opposite of Cage's indeterminism is the overdetermined music of the serialists, which both schools have noted produce similar sounding pieces, yet many serialists, such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen have used aleatoric processes. Michael Nyman argues in Experimental Music that minimalism was a reaction to and made possible by both serialism and indeterminism. Post-modernity reached music and painting at very similar moments, on one hand, the spareness, purity, love of mechanism, abstraction and the grid which are very modernist traits were preserved, as was the emphasis on personalizing style and experimentalism. However, the post-modern rejected the hermeneutic stance - the need to be "in" on the joke as it were - of modernity. Instead the post-modern took the popular and pared down as its aesthetic guide. One of the first movements to overtly break with the modern took inspiration from Cage's work, and its emphasis on layering sounds: Minimalism. Minimal music Many composers in the later 20th century began to explore what is now called minimalism. The most specific definition of minimalism refers to the dominance of process in music — where fragments are layered on top of each other, often looped, to produce the entirety of the sonic canvas. Early examples include Terry Riley's In C and Steve Reich's Drumming. Riley is seen by some as the "father" of minimalistic music with In C, a work comprised of melodic cells that each performer in an ensemble plays through at their own rate. The minimalist wave of composers: Terry Riley, John Oldfield, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and La Monte Young to name the most prominent, wanted music to be "accessible" to ordinary listeners, and wanted to express concrete specific questions of dramatic and music form, not hidden in layers of technique, but very overtly. One key difference between minimalism and previous music is the use of different cells being "out of phase" or determined by the performers; contrast this with the opening of Das Rheingold by Richard Wagner which, despite its use of triadic cells, has each part controlled by the same impulse and moving at the same speed. Minimalistic music is often contentious amongst traditional listeners. Its critics find minimalist music to be overly repetitive and empty while proponents argue that the static elements that are often prevalent draw more interest to small changes. Minimalism has, however, inspired and influenced many composers not usually labeled "minimalist" such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and György Ligeti. Composers such as Arvo Pärt, John Tavener, and Henryk Górecki, whose Symphony No. 3 was the highest selling classical album of the 1990s, have found great success with what has been called "Holy Minimalism" in their deeply felt religious works. The next wave of composers working in this tradition are not called "Minimalist" by some, but are by others. These include opera composer John Adams and his student Aaron Jay Kernis. The expansion of minimalism from process music, to music which relies on texture to hold together the movement of the music has created a wider diversity of compositions and composers. |
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