Let’s kick things off by making a list of some of terms that have been used to describe a certain kind of music: New Music. New-Music. newmusic. “New Music.” Contemporary Classical. Modern Classical. Avant Classical. Alt-Classical. Post-Classical. Indie Classical. Unpop. Non-Pop. Totalist. Avant Garde. Uptown. Downtown. Get the Hell Out of Town? Okay, I made that last one up, but If you’re not sure exactly what kind of music I’m talking about, I can’t blame you.
In the not too distant past, categorizing this music—and by “this music” I mean music written by living composers connected to the classical tradition in some way, shape, or form—was a little bit easier because many composers indentified themselves with a specific stylistic camp within Modern Classical Music. There was Serialism, a style of composition that “democratized” the process by doing away with traditional Western musical hierarchical conventions, like harmony. And Minimalism, which is built on the repetition of a small amount of musical material. Sure, people are still writing music like this and would likely identify themselves with the given category, but recently, like in the last 10 years or so, more and more young composers have been creating music that defies this kind of simple categorization.
But it’s not just that this new musical movement defies categorization; it resists it. A lot of the new music being created these days doesn’t want to be (and simply can’t be) bound by the constraints of being labeled.
Depending on who you are—composer, performer, journalist, marketer, PR person—there are certainly benefits and drawbacks to making everything so neat and tidy. How much does it matter if there is or isn’t a catch-all term for this music? Is it necessary? Got a new term? Let me know your thoughts in the comments section.
Filed in: Nomenclature.
