Music After the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture Since 1989

By Tim Rutherford-Johnson

Book Overview

"...the best extant map of our sonic shadowlands, and it has changed how I listen."--Alex Ross, The New Yorker

"...an essential survey of contemporary music."--New York Times

"...sharp, provacative and always on the money. The listening list alone promises months of fresh discovery, the main text a fresh new way of navigating the world of sound."--The Wire

2017 Music Book of the Year--Alex Ross, The New Yorker

Music after the Fall is the first book to survey contemporary Western art music within the transformed political, cultural, and technological environment of the post-Cold War era. In this book, Tim Rutherford-Johnson considers musical composition against this changed backdrop, placing it in the context of globalization, digitization, and new media. Drawing connections with the other arts, in particular visual art and architecture, he expands the definition of Western art music to include forms of composition, experimental music, sound art, and crossover work from across the spectrum, inside and beyond the concert hall.

Each chapter is a critical consideration of a wide range of composers, performers, works, and institutions, and develops a broad and rich picture of the new music ecosystem, from North American string quartets to Lebanese improvisers, from electroacoustic music studios in South America to ruined pianos in the Australian outback. Rutherford-Johnson puts forth a new approach to the study of contemporary music that relies less on taxonomies of style and technique than on the comparison of different responses to common themes of permission, fluidity, excess, and loss.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520283155
• ISBN13: 9780520283152
• Release Date: February 2017
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Comprehensive, Current, Complex

Coverage in this survey is broad and detailed. Most detailed treatment of contemporary Western art music that I have ever read. Listening to some of the works online has me asking, is most of this time in compositional music about the CONCEPTS involved, versus the aural EXPERIENCE ? Always interesting to read about while the actual results beg the question of who + why is actually listening this evening.