Description
Much of contemporary music’s experimentation is the direct result of developments of the preceding decades. Just as it’s impossible, at least in retrospect, to imagine or understand the work of such composers as Schoenberg without looking back to Wagner, we can understand the creations of John Cage and, in turn, Cage’s musical descendants, through exploring the ideas of Schoenberg, who was one of Cage’s most important teachers and inspirations.
Technology, and more specifically the expansive and heretofore unimaginable opportunities that computer technology provides, has had an incredible effect on contemporary music: for the first time ever, many musics from all cultures and many eras of human history are instantaneously accessible to a wide swath of the public to hear, engage with, and react to. Moreover, the palettes with which composers may articulate their artistic visions has expanded immeasurably as well, thanks to digital advances; many contemporary composers are as likely to include a laptop in their works as they are acoustic instruments.
In our era’s fractured and utterly diverse musical scene, some of the most warmly embraced works that have been especially popular not just with traditional classical audiences, but with a wider public as well, have come from three American composers: Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and John Adams. Often rather mistakenly lumped together as “minimalists” along with such colleagues as Terry Riley and La Monte Young, the work of Glass, Reich, and Adams have had huge reverberations in musical culture—and not just in classical music: for example, Steve Reich has been cited as an inspiration by the influential rock band Sonic Youth.
Other composers have cultivated sounds whose roots stem not in the Western European art music tradition, but look instead to other sources: composer Osvaldo Golijov, for example, draws upon rich sonic inspirations that range from Schubert to Argentine tango to the music of the Middle East. Regardless of their respective aesthetic preferences, however, what composers of our day share is a restless desire to engage and grapple with the realities of our world today, in all of its complexities. Through such innovation, classical music continues to be a living and vital art form that speaks to all of us in fresh, exciting ways.
