Some really interesting points here I need to mull over at more length, but I thionk there are a couple of
practical details that might be worth adding now:
The first has been touched on already-the sheer difficulty of getting second performances versus the relativeease of cd production and the free audio market of the net .
Secondly, the pragmatic impliactions of 'accountability' or 'relevance' which gets characterised as meddling or
dumbing-down, and can be. I think it may also mean a need to examine musical ideas in extra-musical aspects-
economic for one, but also sociological, psychological, ecological, in that the world which the 'universal language'
inhabits is more interpersonally immediate than it very recently was.
Thirdly, whatever the idiom or soundworld, some guys antiscipate the bones, or read the runes, of what comes
to pass (this is a very personal opinion, but it more straightforwardly means that the best of the avant-garde
lends substanced to the spread of stylistic approaches that a paradigm shift(s),something like the introduction of the web or neo-cons/ radical Islam etc etc).
Fourthly, and this is related to the above, the influence of events is a personal, psychologically filtered phenomenon. By way of a literary analogy,I remember Robert Robinson reading a bit of light verse written by a Don about his open heartsurgery which illustrates the point that you can sometimes make profound points with devastating simplicity...
(Good songwriters, for example, have this down and always have had.You might feel that the more radical side
of Satie is imbedded in Gymnopadie 1 even in its ubiquity,similarly Berio via his Folk Songs or Rendering and his
take on his Dad's bandleadership thus, Henze and Montepulciano, etc etc)
...This is a fact which, I think ,evaded many composers in the 60s-80s and then got overegged by some of the
minimalists who were one-dimensionally hyper-technically so.   The sheer density of the cultural web (virtual
and quotidian ) kind of perversely obliges us to be clear-headed rather than the opacity of various periods.
This can mean flip and facile, but the measure of form deployment and relevant technology maybe can turn this around-and rewriting from the reactivity of the first draft.

The stuff in post 25 was all a bit over-diffuse and muddled, let me try to clarify what I was getting at.

Much music, possibly much genuinely diverse music, is written during many periods. Some composers achieve some success and thus have the chance to develop their idioms and ideas with the (significant) benefit of being able to work with performers, hear their works played in various types of spaces, and build up their experience in this respect. Inevitably, the music we discuss here, as being '21st century music' will be that which is filtered through that process i.e. either that which in one way or another fulfils certain criteria (which might include market utility) that have been ordained by those with the power to give a composer opportunities, or that written by a composer who has access to certain appropriate social circles, and may be able to get performed simply from ingratiating themselves in those circles (or, perhaps most likely, a combination of the two). We can all probably cite examples of composers who haven't achieved the success we think they deserve, and would probably incorporate them into our arguments; however, in terms of the company here (those posting on this thread), like it or not we constitute rather rareified circles within the wider society, and those who we come across, and whose work we come across, will inevitably be affected by their degree of access to our circles. The reservoir of work we consider when answering these questions is filtered through these processes, and constitutes only a part of what is written, or perhaps more importantly, what might be written. So that, for example, it may be the case that someone from a background that brings with it no particular access to any circles within new music (to take a stark example, say a young woman who grew up in a poor background, far from any of the major metropolitan centres), and who writes music from a position that is relatively uninterested in many of the currently dominant trends and idioms, is someone whose work we are not that likely to encounter (there will of course be exceptions, amongst those of certain backgrounds who work quadruply hard to try and get noticed, though many will use 'pushy' as an easy put-down for them, when they are simply doing what is necessary in order to attain something of what others take for granted). And most of those posting in this thread (including myself) are, in one sense or another, deeply embroiled in a musical world which is surely not entirely detached from other dominant cultural values of our time. Now, I could give you my arguments about how cultural values might have taken a step for what I would think is the better after 9/11, whilst in reality maybe the reverse is the case, reflecting the nature of the response to the event, and its deeper implications upon society, culture and consciousness, from which it would be a brave person who would claim they are totally independent. But that of course reflects personal political convictions and cultural preferences, and stands or falls only to the extent one accepts them or otherwise.

But the sum total of what I'm trying to articulate above is to say: how has the music that comes to our attention (and that which gets played) changed since 9/11 (if it has), and have the valorisations that lead to certain things assuming a more central position than others changed? I'm not sure if the initial question to the thread can be answered truly meaningfully without at least taking these questions into account. In defining our object ('21st century music') in some way that's not so infinite as to be beyond apprehension, we are already bringing (inevitably) all sorts of cultural values (which I would argue are connected to the implicit ideologies within the wider culture that we inhabit) into play.

Hmmmmmm, was I trying to say things more clearly?

I've just speed-read thro' this, so apologies if this post doesn't address specific points.

A lot of what is being discussed here seems quite close to what I posted on yesterday in the Ades Hoax thread, particularly about "widening access" and plurality.

However, the point I wanted to make is that we need to distinguish between the broad picture of music at any particular point in history (eg the last 25 years, or the years 1790 - 1810) and the incredibly small number of composers - and the incredibly small number of works - that really define that point in history from a more distant vantage point. What else was being written at the same time that Beethoven composed Eroica? Nothing remotely like it. Anyone asking our question five years, ten years after Eroica would not see it as the radical work we find it now. Yes, it comes from a tradition, but it breaks with it. And that's why L'apres-midi is so often cited too - one can find its roots in Chopin, Massenet, Wagner, but its aesthetic is utterly dissimilar. Whereas with Schoenberg's 2nd quartet, the sense of a shared tradition is strong, as is the sense of it emerging from an aesthetic which is familiar to its audience - yes, even in the final movement; it is the language not the tradition that is radically different. I guess what I am trying to say is that social, political, historical events all take time to filter through into a lingua franca, by which time the true radicals have moved on.

I've been thinking about this - essentially agree with the argument, but would like to nuance it a bit further. A hardline postmodernist would, I suppose, argue that that 'history' itself is a creation of our own times (it may also concur with those created in other times, but that does not negate the point). So that, say, we deem the Eroica to be a radical and influential work because of the particular small number of works from history that we have deemed to be important, selected out of a great many more that were written in Beethoven's time and afterwards, so as to form our own canonical tradition, or simply to construct a 'tradition'. What Beethoven achieved was certainly influential in terms of the succeeding composers that we incorporate into our 'tradition', but it might be possible to construct an alternative tradition in which Beethoven is less of a significant influence. This type of argument is presented at its most extreme in Tia DeNora's book Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in Vienna, 1792-1803. By her argument (of necessity I must simplify it a bit), for various reasons certain sections of the Viennese aristocracy decided that Beethoven's work best constituted the type of route for music they favoured, hence he was supported, institutionalised, and later canonised, as opposed to other composers of his time. And because of that institutionalisation, a lot of subsequent music is 'read' relative to Beethoven, in particular leading to the privileging of a post-Beethovenian canon of works that can in some sense be seen to follow in his wake. If those aristocrats had chosen another composer and aesthetic, we would be reading a different canon (and other composers would probably have turned out differently, without the earlier institutionalisation of Beethoven leading to him representing something so significant). I don't accept DeNora's thesis, not least because she doesn't engage with the particularities of the works themselves and how they accorded with the function towards which they were enlisted (the works seem almost immaterial in her account, a strategy that has deleteriously influenced some subsequent cultural histories, including some of those dealing with post-1945 music). But in some sense, this way of seeing how certain interests played a part in creating a history that might have gone in other directions should not be dismissed, especially not in favour of a principle of some sort of 'natural selection'. Certainly there are some cases where today we value more highly composers who were not such big names in their day (though the extent to which this occurs may be over-estimated in line with romantic myths about the poor, unrecognised genius), and vice versa (for example Meyerbeer, absolutely huge in his time, all over Europe now known for the most part just to 19th century opera buffs). But nonetheless, I believe what we view as musical history, certainly for that period, is significantly connected to processes of canonisation and institutionalisation that went on during the period itself. One of the arguments that has become prominent in some recent musicology involves challenging the very perceived centrality of the Austro-German tradition in the 19th century (or sometimes more broadly the Franco-German tradition), arguing that the perceived lesser value often accorded, say, to Italian opera, 19th century Russian music, or various other things emerging from the peripheries of these traditions (often relegated to short sections in books called 'Nationalism in Music' and the like), is itself the product of a certain system of valorisation that has been institutionalised and is rarely questioned, such that the latter groups of music are mostly seen primarily in terms of how well they accord with the privileged attributes of the former.

If one takes this all the way along the post-modern relativist path, there is no intrinsic value in any particular tradition, it tells purely about the priorities (and interests) of those protecting such a tradition today. I do feel there are reasons that are not purely arbitrary or political for why the Austro-German 19th century tradition has been more lasting and influential than others, but it's not an easy point to defend. One thing that is often pointed to is the huge difference in popular acclaim and appreciation for Puccini and, say, Schoenberg (the latter a bit younger, but they were both equally active during the very early 20th century), whereas the latter tends to hold a much more prestigious status in terms of the writing of musical history. And this argument is often extended much further when it comes to post-1945 'modernist' music, which it cannot be denied has relied heavily on a system of state subsidy in order to be maintained. The post-modernists, apart from saying that the construction of this tradition itself represents all sorts of sublimated and hidden assumptions that relate to gender, nationality, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and so on, would argue that it constitutes a wholly artificial phenomenon that in reality is so distant and irrelevant for most people as to represent nothing more than the jealously guarded interests of a small elite. Furthermore, this 'tradition' is even more irrelevant when one compares it with popular music that arose in the same period, which has achieved worldwide recognition and success (and emerges from African-American rather than white male traditions). And even within 'classical' music, the tradition itself supposedly privileges the more abstract, 'autonomous' (or nominally so), atonal music as opposed to other types of classical music which were being written simultaneously. A view of tradition that (say) leads from the Darmstadt composers of the 1950s (and maybe also some American experimentalists from the same period) in various directions, but sees the so-called 'new complexity' (and other developments) as an extension of such a tradition, would, to the post-modernist, be the epitome of such a construction. And the status we assign even to such now-distant works as Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune are tied up with the privileging of a certain canon that came afterwards (including, for example, Bartók and Boulez) and which can be seen to be infuenced by the piece. Other canons (especially other more popular canons) might lead to the Debussy's significance being perceived in a different way.

I'm most definitely not subscribing to the post-modernist point of view, but believe the points made by such arguments can't be dismissed as easily as some would like. Even the value sometimes unthinkingly assigned to something for being 'radical' or 'influential' should perhaps be questioned. The reasons we see the Beethoven or Debussy works as historically significant, and the ways we construct histories that incorporate them in primary positions might, whilst not being arbitrary, be more contingent than we realise. So the Eroica seems radical to us not just because of what we can see with hindsight, but also because of the particular aesthetic priorities (and all else they might entail) which inform that particular manifestation of hindsight. And in terms of the DeNora argument, this may have something to do with a rather unquestioning acceptance of the importance of those figures whose canonical status derives in part from how they were institutionalised by those who may have had all sorts of other agendas (pace the use of CIA money to aid the reputations of Abstract Expressionist artists during the Cold War).

As for works now seen as radical being perceived as such close to when they were written, there are exceptions - Schumann's review of the Symphonie Fantastique being one. Though Schumann was quite exceptional amongst critics of his time; his canonisation as a critic (and that of various others) might also be somewhat contingent.

With respect to surveying the 21st century, I'd simply conclude from this that we should be highly aware of the extent to which our own current priorities, and the 'tradition' from which we are seeing the music we are surveying growing out of, might look very different to those in other times, places or social situations. For example, do we look at much South American 'classical' music unless it has actually been played in the West (or if recordings have been distributed here)? And would that music not be equally relevant to the issues at stake? And if, when much else has changed in the world, in terms of the music we are considering as being that of the 21st century there has not seemed to be any significant shift (of course others might say there has), mightn't that fact say something about the way music is going, arguably becoming more detached from the rest of the world than ever? To write a piece like Ades's Arcadiana means one thing in a time of relative peace (or at least when there is the appearance of such); if it had been written in a time whilst Britain was engaged in a vicious imperial war (as it is) would mean something else. Conversely, Finnissy's English Country-Tunes meant something when written in Jubilee Year, a time of street parties, flags everywhere and general patriotic and pro-monarchic sentiment; nowadays, when there the standing of the monarchy in public opinion has considerably diminished, and other cultural values have changed in certain ways, some of its original connotations seem less immediate. These are obviously both examples taken from the narrow field of British contemporary 'classical' music (even more narrowly, of composers within that field who have attained a degree of institutionalised status), but maybe give an idea of the relationship between music and context that could potentially be applied to other highly distinct areas.

I don't have time to get fully into this now, but I would like to pose one possible answer to the original question: I think the effects of technology (of peformance, composition, reproduction and distribution) will define - if they are not already defining - 21st-century music. In particular, writing music down in more-or-less traditional notation is already becoming more and more a loaded act, an emphasized locus of decision-making; it is no longer a default precondition of "classical" music production. 

So: not only will non-notated music and non-traditionally-"performed" music, I would suppose, become more and more prominent as a subset of "contemporary classical music" - but those of us (!) who still hew closely to the idea of musical notation as such will be forced to take an ideological stand on its behalf, and thus notation qua notation will require a great deal of compositional energy.  In the USA, at least, where everyone is constantly crying about the death of classical music, the music that I feel to be most on life support (optimistically, perhaps!!) is precisely that for which traditional notation and presentation is still an unexamined assumption. The lists of interesting youngish/American composers that Aaron, I and others have occasionally attempted to come up with has hewed quite closely to this standard, actually; in some similar and some different ways both Aaron and I actively take up the challenge of making notation as such relevant, and other young composers we have mentioned like Sam Mirelman and Rob Wannamaker and Marianthi Alexandri-Papalexandri all exist in a sort of post-notational world, where the act of writing on paper is more and more charged with near-polemical energies.

Ian, Thanks for your interesting comments on my post. I agree with you about  Feldman and Kurtag, in their later works they seem to have finally attained what they were trying for, the music accrues a true sense of line.
The difficulty perhaps is that the journey to that point involved a lot of persistent faith among philosophers-of whom we need more in the musical thought- rather than just music lovers.
Part of the argument about notation is that people think it's time-consuming and restricting-I think the argument
for form as propogator has to be made. It's also about the value of an extent of complexity in organisation. I
notice an interest gathering in graphic representation as technology-for example I have a record producer
colleague who was recently new to stave notation but works in Logic, which presents complex nuanced editable
asdr waveforms on a timeline. I wrote something with him on it as an experiment, and it turns out to have a
serviceable language even for a techno-greenhorn me to work with. In technology, the argument for complexity
has been won, so long I guess as people don't fetishise it. Is that what some musicologists do with stave
notation? There again, I think there's something earthed and grounding about the act of notation, like a mandala,
and I guess a model-making sculptor or choreographer, say, could feel similarly. Promoting that might be like the
idea of an allotment over a seed catalogue, something to which to gravitate . I guess I'm rooting about in my shed.

Fizzle out? How do you reckon that?

(a) Innovation in electronic music technology is still accelerating, and widening in its applications and implications.
(b) In my previous post I wasn't talking about new forms of notation, but about music which dispenses with notation altogether, which again, as far as I can see, is also by no means fizzling out.

I'm talking about innovations in terms of what composers have done with electronics. Stockhausen, Nono, Schaeffer, Koenig, some early spectral music, certainly did seem to entail pretty major innovations, but in the intervening period I haven't heard much that really compares with that sort of innovatory work (there may of course be plenty of stuff I haven't heard and might change my opinion). Compositional development and technological development haven't necessarily paralleled one another.


I was replying to Evan's post here, you will recall, on notation, which referred both to 'non-notated' music and also that which breaks with traditional notation. In terms of the field of 'classical' music (specifically, that which is organised around composers who produce works that have some durability over and above single performances), I don't see that such radical approaches as to be found in Stockhausen's Aus den Sieben Tagen and Für kommenden Zeiten or Christian Wolff's Prose Collection, all perhaps as far as you can go in terms of placing musical decisions in the hands of performers whilst still maintaining the basic concept of a written work by a composer, or the sets of instructions for producing a piece in Dieter Schnebel's Visible Music, Glossolalie or Lectiones, seem to have been taken up and developed further by subsequent composers; rather, they seem the product of a particular era characterised by experimentation in all sorts of ways.

If you dispense with notation altogether, can you still have composers? It depends what one defines as notation, and whether one counts the examples cited above as being notated works (I think they are). There are of course some works which are still determined by a composer but simply not written down; the instructions being communicated verbally to the performers. But often those works are recorded, as with some jazz compositions, say, providing some other type of document which parallels a notated score (if other jazz musicians want to play something which, however much made their own, is still in some sense 'the same piece', then the recordings they can listen to, absorb and then personalise, serve a similar function to the score). Nonetheless, the particular rendition is often as or more important than the 'work' in this context (something that was also true in some of the 19th century and before, with the cult of the star virtuoso, and the work concept only really starting to become more ingrained). Whatever, the 'composer' (and especially the cult of the 'great composer') would become less central to music-making in such a situation. One might see in such a process a move away from 'composed' music towards improvisation, but considering how free improvisation is an extremely marginal activity, in terms of the degree of appreciation it attains, compared to more commercialised popular music, I see little reason to believe the move wouldn't be towards the almost total domination of the latter. But this isn't just about what will naturally occur, rather about what those controlling the institutions who support music-making that is not entirely subservient to the market deem worthy of institutionalised support. And I get the impression that the direction they are going in is towards one of market utility by proxy. That's ultimately going to mean Michael Nyman more than Evan Parker.