The New Music: The Avant-garde since 1945

Description

This guide to the more adventurous evolutions of music since 1945--pointillism, post-Webernism, integral serialism, free dodecaphony, aleatory and indeterminate music, graphics, musique concrete, electronic music, and theatre music--was first published in 1975 and has been reprinted several times. For this second edition, Smith Brindle has added a new chapter reviewing developments over the decade since first publication. He discusses the decline of experimentalism and the reaction against increasing cerebralism and complexity as variously illustrated by the more recent works of Stockhausen, the minimalist works of Reich and Glass, and the partial return to romanticism. He also reviews the technological revolution which has taken place in computer music and concludes that the future of music will for the time being be most closely associated with technological change and development, rather than with radical changes in compositional techniques. Preface ......Page 8 Acknowledgements ......Page 10 1 The Historical Background ......Page 12 2 The Post-War Years ......Page 14 3 The Webern Cult ......Page 18 4 The Avant-Garde—Pointillism ......Page 26 5 Integral Serialism ......Page 32 6 Numbers ......Page 53 7 Free Twelve-Note Music ......Page 63 8 Indeterminacy, Chance, and Aleatory Music ......Page 71 9 Improvisation—Graphic Scores—Text Scores ......Page 92 10 Concrete Music ......Page 110 11 Electronic Music ......Page 115 12 Cage and Other Americans ......Page 132 13 The Search Outwards—The Orient, Jazz, Archaisms ......Page 144 14 Theatre ......Page 157 15 Colour—New Instrumental Usages ......Page 164 16 Vocal Music—The New Choralism ......Page 174 17 Notation ......Page 186 18 The Avant-Garde and Society ......Page 193 19 Conclusions—1975 ......Page 197 20 Conclusions—1986 ......Page 199 Some New Notation Symbols ......Page 214 Index ......Page 226