Last week I wrote a short article about the composer Kees Tazelaar which began:

"I wonder how long it will take for us to have some concrete idea of what we might mean by the term “21st century music”. It’s a term which still seems somehow alien – we know it must exist, but we don’t yet have a mental image of it. One reason for this perhaps is that much of the music of the commencement de siècle has a retrospective quality, content to situate itself within a chosen tradition."

What do we think about this?

Centuries (or decades) are thoroughly cultural constructions, of course, but those very constructions can engender a certain self-consciousness (composers feeling they are writing fin-de-siècle music and so on). It struck me how a combination of retro-mania and also the privileging of style (or 'styles') over individualism was a major factor in both classical and popular worlds. All lent spurious justification by lots of accompanying rhetoric about post-modernism, irony, and so on and so forth. If there is a way forward for 21st century music, I believe it will come from some sort of critical engagement with this recent tradition that somehow manages to resist becoming subsumed within it, if that is possible.

The high degree of self-consciousness on the part of composers (and performers) about their own place within a certain 'tradition' does seem a highly constraining factor.

Erm, well I did ask a more or less identical question in the 'This is the 21st century' thread, though I'm not sure many of us really tried to answer it there (nor did anyone appear to appreciate the irony of the Blondie quote in my thread title, though that's a small gripe).

Actually, I was thinking about this last week too, Richard, in a slightly different connection. As Ian says, centuries are thoroughly cultural constructions, but some are more constructed than others, as it were. It struck me that 20th-century music is perhaps the second music-historical period we're inclined to characterise as having a beginning and end which roughly match the turns of a century ... if the 19th century was the first, that would make the 20th century the first in which we began to see a pattern based on that way of viewing things. Which means that by the beginning of the 21st century we're expecting '21st-century music' to happen. But why should it? There was a much bigger change in music around 1750 than around 1700. Maybe the big change is to come in 30 years time. Or maybe the biggest change came 40 or 50 years ago, and there won't be another big single shift for another hundred years: maybe we're already well advanced into what historians in 2500 will regard as our music-historical period.

Or maybe history has ended, and we're all in an 'a-periodic' limbo which is going to last until the oil of postmodern relativism lights the fire of holy minimalism and consumes us all to the strains of the Pet Shop Boys' It's A Sin. But that seems unlikely to me.

I was thinking the same thing too Tony about 20thC, and also about what piece of music (and therefore composer) heralded a change for the 19thC. The change in the 18thC seems to have come midway I think.

For the 19thC and 20thC did the actual event of a new century spurn someone to make a musical statement early on (first decade) which significantly affected developments throughout the early part (or later) of that century? Maybe we can nominate our choices for those century-declaring works and look out for candidates for the 21stC?  - bringing us back on-topic  


Edit: I'm too log writing this so a couple of posts have snuck in front, oh well....

John W

Paul Griffiths (in his A Concise History of Modern Music) cites Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, written in 1892-1894, as the beginning of modern music (and I think as symbolic of the beginning of the 20th century). That would fit with a 'short 19th century' model, beginning at some point in the 1820s, ending in the 1890s, but I don't find it convincing. The difference between that work and (say) Wagner seems one of degree rather than fundamental type.

Sorry to bring up an old chestnut here, but it seems relevant in this context. Did the world change significantly after September 2001? And might that have knock-on implications for culture, perhaps in the form of a move away from the shopping spree aesthetic of the 1990s?

I do tend to agree with Ian's view that Debussy is closer to Wagner than to, say, Shostakovich. (It's also worth remembering that Brahms didn't die until Debussy was 35, 3 years after the Prélude, and indeed if Brahms had lived to 86 he would have been able to attend Debussy's funeral.)

On the other hand, when you think about the sorts of things that make Schoenberg's 1908-11 innovations look like less of a break with the 19th century than they seemed at the time (a lot of triads and standard vertical progressions disappeared rather quickly, but instrumentation, certain principles of melodic voice-leading, some aspects of rhythmic behaviour, and the basic inhabiting of a world built in equal temperament in which pitch took precedence over noise: all these remained in common), those sorts of things do admittedly put the Schoenberg of Erwartung - or, a couple of decades later, of the Variations for Orchestra - closer to Wagner and Brahms than to Boulez or Cage or even Varèse. But they also put Elliott Carter or Witold Lutoslawski closer to Schoenberg than they are to Ferneyhough or Xenakis or Penderecki or John Tavener.

At this point it's not so clear whether we need to simply shift our dividing line to a different point in time or to give up on the idea of a chronological, successive periodisation at all. I'm not very keen on interpreting this as automatically equating to 'the end of history', as certain cultural commentators have done with alacrity. But maybe history has not quite ended but forked. Another pertinent observation about the twentieth century, also as it happens coming from the pen of Paul Griffiths (in his recent Concise History of Western Music), is this: that the twentieth century is the first in which we have not only styles of newly-composed music to take into account, but also performances of music composed in a completely different era but set down on record, in permanently-archived performances whose styles can also be identified and used to characterise successive decades (and, one supposes, as time goes on, centuries).

Indeed neither Debussy nor anyone else provided history with a "clean break" at the end of the 19th century; the fact that Brahms was still alive when the Prélude was written also indicates that history wasn't completely unforked at that time either. There may now be a confusing array of positions and directions in music, such that it may seem that a chronological view of things has lost some of its validity, but one shouldn't lose sight of the fact that history is in fact continuing to grind on, as Ian points out. Here are a few random observations:

(1) Radio 3 (to name only one broadcaster) is in the process of phasing out live broadcasting. While we can all deplore such a development, we might also see it as a symptom of a wider trend towards the idea that live performance (as opposed to listening to recordings, etc.) isn't taken for granted as the "optimal" way of experiencing music. (I disagree with this view, but then I disagree with much that goes on in the world.)

(2) Today's composers have less access to traditional performing resources such as orchestras and opera houses than their forebears, unless they (by happy coincidence or my careful planning) happen to write the kind of music which doesn't stray too far outside the traditional repertoire of those institutions. Perhaps one thing which might develop as a distinctive "21st century" musical phenomenon is the abandonment of those resources by most composers. The obvious place to look here would be in the use of new technology, which in turn then begs the question of whether the composer-notation-performer model of musical production is the most appropriate way to deal with that situation. To an extent this development has already been happening since the advent of electronic music in the mid-20th century, and the fact that electronic music production has undergone a shift, from being confined within expensive and exclusive studios, towards being possible on mass-production laptops, and from painstaking tape-manipulation to real-time performance, can only speed up the process.