Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: trajectories of twentieth-century music
- 1 Peripheries and interfaces: the Western impact on other music
- 2 Music of a century: museum culture and the politics of subsidy
- 3 Innovation and the avant-garde, 1900–20
- 4 Music, text and stage: the tradition of bourgeois tonality to the Second World War
- 5 Classic jazz to 1945
- 6 Flirting with the vernacular: America in Europe, 1900–45
- 7 Between the wars: traditions, modernisms, and the ‘little people from the suburbs’
- 8 Brave new worlds: experimentalism between the wars
- 9 Proclaiming the mainstream: Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern
- 10 Rewriting the past: classicisms of the inter-war period
- 11 Music of seriousness and commitment: the 1930s and beyond
- 12 Other mainstreams: light music and easy listening, 1920–70
- 13 New beginnings: the international avant-garde, 1945–62
- 14 Individualism and accessibility: the moderate mainstream, 1945–75
- 15 After swing: modern jazz and its impact
- 16 Music of the youth revolution: rock through the 1960s
- 17 Expanding horizons: the international avant-garde, 1962–75
- 18 To the millennium: music as twentieth-century commodity
- 19 Ageing of the new: the museum of musical modernism
- 20 (Post-)minimalisms 1970–2000: the search for a new mainstream
- 21 History and class consciousness: pop music towards 2000
- 22 ‘Art’ music in a cross-cultural context: the case of Africa
- Appendix 1 Personalia
- Appendix 2 Chronology
- Index
- References
20 - (Post-)minimalisms 1970–2000: the search for a new mainstream
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: trajectories of twentieth-century music
- 1 Peripheries and interfaces: the Western impact on other music
- 2 Music of a century: museum culture and the politics of subsidy
- 3 Innovation and the avant-garde, 1900–20
- 4 Music, text and stage: the tradition of bourgeois tonality to the Second World War
- 5 Classic jazz to 1945
- 6 Flirting with the vernacular: America in Europe, 1900–45
- 7 Between the wars: traditions, modernisms, and the ‘little people from the suburbs’
- 8 Brave new worlds: experimentalism between the wars
- 9 Proclaiming the mainstream: Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern
- 10 Rewriting the past: classicisms of the inter-war period
- 11 Music of seriousness and commitment: the 1930s and beyond
- 12 Other mainstreams: light music and easy listening, 1920–70
- 13 New beginnings: the international avant-garde, 1945–62
- 14 Individualism and accessibility: the moderate mainstream, 1945–75
- 15 After swing: modern jazz and its impact
- 16 Music of the youth revolution: rock through the 1960s
- 17 Expanding horizons: the international avant-garde, 1962–75
- 18 To the millennium: music as twentieth-century commodity
- 19 Ageing of the new: the museum of musical modernism
- 20 (Post-)minimalisms 1970–2000: the search for a new mainstream
- 21 History and class consciousness: pop music towards 2000
- 22 ‘Art’ music in a cross-cultural context: the case of Africa
- Appendix 1 Personalia
- Appendix 2 Chronology
- Index
- References
Summary
The conventional wisdom is that Minimalism – an idiom of clear, non-decorative lines, repetition, and great tonal simplicity which arose in the 1960s and 70s – was the last identifiable new style in music history. Actually, there has since been an accelerating series of new styles, many of them building on minimalist roots toward greater and world-music-inspired complexity.
Kyle GannMy music is very much an example of what’s happened to music at the end of the twentieth century. We’re in a kind of post-style era. Composers my age and younger, we are not writing in one, highly defined, overarching expression, like Steve Reich or Luciano Berio would write.
John AdamsAfter the last new style
As a label for trends in music history since 1970, the term ‘post-minimalism’ has, at first, a seductively familiar ring – if by ‘music history’ we mean the succession of compositional styles conceptualized as a linear progression, most memorably analogized by Donald Francis Tovey as ‘the mainstream of music’. If ‘post-minimalist’ is a music-historical adjective of time, like ‘post-Romantic’ or ‘pre-classical’, then the familiar narrative strategies of classical music might still apply: an early style (minimalism) progresses – either through evolutionary ramification or dialectical synthesis – to another, later one (post-minimalism). The stream flows on.
So argues Kyle Gann, in the epigraph above and in his 1997 survey American Music in the Twentieth Century. But, as Gann acknowledges, minimalism is most often seen not as the beginning of a new drama of stylistic evolution, but as finis Terrae musicologicae, as the ‘last identifiable new style in music history’.
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- The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music , pp. 539 - 556Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004
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