Listening to Contemporary/New Music

There are some crazy sounds coming out of the contemporary/new music world today! So many in fact that it’s difficult to keep all the genres straight! There are minimalists, spectralists, neo-romantics, electronic composers, and about one hundred others, all with their unique sounds. The extremities of music today span the distance between the most pleasing melody played on the cello, to the most challenging and dissonant sounds coming from an amplified piano filled with paper-clips, or even pieces that are just silence. But there is good news! There are things that tie all of music together, from Mozart up to the most experimental of today’s composers, and if we can key into those things, making sense of the new music world becomes a whole lot easier.

All of music is sound (and silence) unfolding in time. Whether you’re listening to Beethoven, Charles Ives, Brahms, Or Augusta Read Thomas, all you’re doing is listening to different kinds of sounds unfold over a given length of time. What’s more, is that it’s not the sounds itself that matter as much as the EFFECT that those sounds have on you.

TRY THIS: Listen to these two very different pieces to the right (the world premiere of Anna Clyne’s Masquerade, and Augusta Read Thomas’s Jubilee), and instead of focusing on the sounds themselves, focus on how you react to those sounds. Do they make you feel tense? Angry? Happy? Keep an open open mind!

Now let’s compare! To the left are two more videos, one by Claude Debussy, one of the beloved masters, and another by Gyorgy Ligeti, a pioneering figure in modern music.

Compare the languages (sounds) of these two pieces, and compare their effects. Are there moments when these two composers might be saying the same thing in a different way?

Debussy’s Nuages (clouds) is impressionistic to it’s core, giving us only a sense, (an impression!) of the totality of the image he is trying to create.

Ligeti’s Atmospheres (featured in 2001: A space Odyssey) can in many ways be heard as doing something similar. The meandering of sounds and lack of center forces us to look inward to create our own imagery, or explore our own emotions that are prompted by the music.