Contemporary Music: Theoretical and Philosophical Perspectives

This collection of essays and interviews addresses important theoretical, philosophical and creative issues in Western art music at the end of the twentieth- and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries. The book offers a wide range of international perspectives from prominent musicologists, philosophers and composers and includes new interviews with Pierre Boulez, Brian Ferneyhough, Helmut Lachenmann, and Wolfgang Rihm.

Contents: Introduction; Part One: Theoretical Perspectives and Retrospectives: Clock, rule and balance, Hughes Dufourt; The foundations of spectral music, Hughes Dufourt; Atonal harmony: from set to scale, Célestin Deliège; In search of lost harmony: metamorphoses in twentieth-century harmonic thought, Rudolf Frisius; Against a theory of (new) musical complexity, Richard Toop; Heterogeneity: or, the choice of being omnivorous, Pascal Decroupet; Varèse, serialism and the acoustic metaphor, Pascal Decroupet; 'I open and close', Richard Toop; Time of conflict: the post-Webern years, Célestin Deliège; Part Two: Philosophical Critiques and Speculations after Adorno: A philosophy of totality, Herman Sabbe; What can be expected from a logic of twentieth-century music?, François Nicolas; Post-modernism and the survival of the avant-garde, Max Paddison; The constraints of material: Adorno, Benjamin, Arendt, Anne Boissière; Towards an aesthetics of risk, Marc Jiminez; Music and social relations: towards a theory of mediation, Max Paddison; Index; Bibliography.