Contemporary Music

Max Paddison is Professor of Music Aesthetics, Department of Music, University of Durham, UK. He is the author of Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music and Adorno, Modernism and Mass Culture. Irène Deliège, University of Liège, Belgium, is founding editor of the journal Musicae Scientiae and founding member of ESCOM, the European Society of the Cognitive Sciences of Music.

• IntroductionContemporary Music: Theory, Aesthetics, Critical Theory; I: Theoretical Perspectives and Retrospectives; 1: The Principles of Music and the Rationalization of Theory 1; 2: Atonal Harmony: From Set to Scale; 3: In Search of Lost Harmony 1; 4: Against a Theory of Musical (New) Complexity 1; 5: Heterogeneity: Or, on the Choice of Being Omnivorous; 6: Varèse, Serialism and the Acoustic Metaphor; 7: 'I Open and Close'? 1; 8: A Period of Confrontation: The Post-Webern Years 1; II: Philosophical Critiques and Speculations After Adorno; 9: A Philosophy of Totality; 10: Possibilities for a Work-Immanent Contemporary Musical Logic; 11: Postmodernism and the Survival of the Avant-garde; 12: Material Constraints: Adorno, Benjamin, Arendt; 13: Towards an Aesthetics of Risk; 14: Music and Social Relations: Towards a Theory of Mediation; III: Creative Orientations; 15: Music, Ambiguity, Buddhism: A Composer's Perspective; 16: Artistic Orientations, Aesthetic Concepts, and the Limits of Explanation: An Interview with Pierre Boulez 1; 17: Failed Time, Successful Time, Shadowtime: An Interview with Brian Ferneyhough; 18: Sound Structures, Transformations, and Broken Magic:; 19: Hunting and Forms: An Interview with Wolfgang Rihm; Postlude:Helmut Lachenmann, Wolfgang Rihm and the Austro-German Tradition

'One of the most impressive theoretical and analytical achievements of this book is its promotion and development of a more 'harmonic' approach to contemporary music - even to the most radically pointillistic works of the early 1950s... the overall impression is of a concerted musicological effort to rethink new music beyond the fragmenting effects of Fortean pitch-set theory to sophisticated harmonic and polyphonic models that encourage the detailed and nuanced interpretation of individual works. It is not only in these large projects that this book succeeds, however. Some of the most eloquent and perceptive writers on contemporary music have been assembled here, and the details of the text are often as rewarding and provocative as the bigger picture... its overall contribution to contemporary music studies is substantial; it deserves to be a fixture on reading lists for many years to come.' Tempo 'Hats off to Max Paddison, who acted as an overall translator and translations editor. With great devotion he looked for English equivalents of sometimes almost untranslatable terms. This renders the essays of among others Deliège and Decroupet (who mostly publish in French and German) accessible to Anglophone readers in the best possible way... a coherent collection of essays and interviews...' Musicae scientiae