21st-century classical music
Encyclopedia
21st-century classical music
is a diverse art form. Some elements of the previous century have been retained but there is a growing move towards post-modernism, polystylism
and eclecticism
, which seek to incorporate elements of all styles of music irrespective of whether these are "classical" or not—these efforts represent a slackening differentiation between the various musical genres
. Pop, jazz, rock, and others are seen as styles to be used in any work, rather than as separate disciplines. The combination of classical music and multimedia
is also a notable practice in the 21st century; the Internet
, alongside its related technology, are important resources in this respect. The number of important women composers has also increased significantly.
asked 10 composers, mostly British, to discuss the latest trends in western classical music. The consensus was that no particular style is favoured and that individuality is to be encouraged. The magazine interviewed Brian Ferneyhough
, Michael Nyman
, Einojuhani Rautavaara
, Henri Dutilleux
, John Adams, James MacMillan, Jonathan Harvey
, Julian Anderson
, John Tavener
, and Roxanna Panufnik
. The works of each of these composers represent different aspects of the music of this century but these composers all came to the same basic conclusion: music is too diverse to categorise or limit. In his interview with the magazine, Dutilleux argued that "there is only good or bad music, whether serious or popular".
Anderson, a British composer, uses popular house
and club music as the basis for many of his compositions. Indeed works such as Khorovod (1994) seem to anticipate the modern trend. His music combines the music of traditional cultures from outside the western concert tradition with elements of modernism
, spectral music
and electronic music
. His large-scale Book of Hours for 20 players and live electronics premiered in 2005.
Tavener, another British composer, draws his inspiration from eastern mysticism
and the music of the Orthodox Church.
Nyman is an English minimalist
best known for his film score
for The Piano
. He often borrows from Baroque music
and is an acclaimed composer of operas, including (in this century) Facing Goya
and Sparkie
. The latter work draws its inspiration from a talking
budgie
. His shorter works often written for his own Michael Nyman Band
.
Often styled the "Father of New Complexity
", English composer Brian Ferneyhough
has recently started writing works which reference those of past composers. His Dum transisset are based on Elizabethan composer Christopher Tye
's works for viol
; the fourth string quartet references Schönberg
. His opera Shadowtime (libretto by Charles Bernstein
), which premiered in Munich in 2004, is based on the life of the German philosopher Walter Benjamin
.
Rautavaara is a Finnish composer writing in a variety of forms and styles. His opera Rasputin premiered in 2003 and he has written a large—and rapidly growing—body of orchestral and chamber works.
Active since the mid-1940s, the French composer Dutilleux follows the Impressionist
and Neoclassical
tradition of Maurice Ravel
, Claude Debussy
, and Albert Roussel
. His latest works include Correspondances and Le temps l'horloge
, both of which are song cycle
s.
John Adams is a Pulitzer Prize
-winning American composer with strong roots in minimalism. His best-known recent works include On the Transmigration of Souls
(2002), a choral piece commemorating the victims of the 11 September 2001 attacks (for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Music
in 2003) and Doctor Atomic
(2005), which covers Robert Oppenheimer
, the Manhattan Project
, and the building of the first atomic bomb. In October 2008, Adams told BBC Radio 3 that he had been blacklisted by the U.S. Homeland Security department and immigration services.
MacMillan is a Scottish composer and conductor influenced by both traditional Scottish music
and his own Roman Catholic
faith. His most recent works include operas (The Sacrifice
premiered in 2007) and a St John Passion (2008).
Harvey, a British composer, was Composer-in-Association with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
from 2005-2008. His 21st-century works include the large-scale cantata Mothers shall not Cry (2000), written for the BBC Proms
Millennium, and the orchestral works Body Mandala (2006) and Speakings (2008).
Polish composer Roxanna Panufnik
, the daughter of Sir Andrzej Panufnik
, is one of the growing number of important women working in 21st-century composition. Her output includes operas, ballets, music theatre, choral works, chamber music, and music for film and television. Her most widely performed works include Westminster Mass, commissioned for Westminster Cathedral Choir on the occasion of Cardinal Hume's 75th birthday, The Music Programme, an opera for Polish National Opera's millennium season which received its UK premiere at the BOC Covent Garden Festival, and settings for solo voices and orchestra of Vikram Seth's Beastly Tales—the first of which was commissioned by the BBC for Patricia Rozario and City of London Sinfonia. The 2008/9 season has seen no less than 18 premieres of her works in nine different countries, performed by such diverse artists such as the Mobius Ensemble, Tasmin Little
with the Orchestra of the Swan, The Sixteen
, the Dante Quartet, the Choir of King's College Cambridge, and Valery Gergiev
conducting the World Orchestra for Peace.
, Francesca Caccini
, Clara Schumann
, Fanny Mendelssohn
, and Amy Beach
are well-known examples), the 21st century has seen an increase in their number and importance. Roxanna Panufnik, in the aforementioned interview with the BBC, says:
The trend started in the latter quarter of the 20th century when Musgrave was joined by such prominent composers as Weir, LeFanu, Sofia Gubaidulina
, Pauline Oliveros
, Meredith Monk
, Maryanne Amacher
, Kaija Saariaho
and Joan Tower
—many of whom are only now becoming recognised as important. The trend continues with such people as Panufnik, Davies, Hall, Onutė Narbutaitė
, Julia Wolfe
, Jennifer Higdon
, Olga Neuwirth
, Rebecca Saunders
, and many others joining the ranks.
Yoko Shimomura
is one of the most famous classical composers in Japan. Other notable composers include Kinuyo Yamashita
and Yoko Kanno
.
) is a growing trend in the 21st century. It combines elements of diverse musical genres and compositional techniques into a unified and coherent body of works. Composers will not necessarily employ their entire canon of style and technique in one single work, but rather the composers' body of works as a whole will reveal many different and diverse "styles". While anticipated by earlier trends that incorporated elements of folk music or jazz into classical works, polystylism increased its diversity, as well as its visibility, as it embraced more and more styles in the new century. Composers have often started their musical career in one discipline and have later migrated to or embraced others, while retaining important elements from the former discipline. In some cases, a composer now labelled "classical" may have started out in another discipline. Paul McCartney
has made a similar move from pop music
: he began his career as a member of The Beatles
and has recently composed Standing Stone and Ecce Cor Meum
. A specific label for John Zorn
's music is difficult to choose: he started out as a performance art
ist and moved through various genres including jazz, hardcore punk
, film music
, and classical, and often embraces Jewish musical elements. All of these diverse styles appear in his works.
Julian Anderson
combines elements from many different musical genres and practices in his works. Elements of modernism
, spectral music and electronic music
are combined with elements of the folk music of Eastern Europe and the resulting works are often influenced by the modality of Indian ragas.
Tansy Davies
's music also fuses elements of pop and classical music. Prince
and Iannis Xenakis
are both major influences.
, was composed for a piano, an orchestra, and six video screens. The video segments were created by Tal Rosner
, Adès's civil partner.
Judith Weir
's opera Armida
was premiered on television, rather than on stage. Channel 4
commissioned the work in 2005. The libretto, also written by Weir, updates Torquato Tasso
's 1581 epic poem, setting it in a modern Middle-East conflict which alludes to but never specifically mentions the Iraq War. Weir's opera calls for props that could not be used practically in an opera house, such as a helicopter.
In 2008, Tan Dun
was commissioned by Google to compose Internet Symphony No. 1 - "Eroica" to be performed collaboratively by the YouTube Symphony Orchestra. This work used the internet to recruit orchestra members and the final result was compiled into a mashup video, which premiered worldwide on YouTube.
is best known for his theme music for popular TV series. He is Classic FM's Composer-in-Residence for 2009 and was named Composer of the Year at the Classical BRIT Awards
in 2009. He has also written classical choral works. Karl Jenkins
started out as a Jazz musician and later composed for television advertisement
s, most notably for De Beers
diamond
merchants. The music was included as the title track of the album Diamond Music
. He has since written several important classical works for chorus and orchestra, including The Armed Man
: A Mass for Peace.
, which launched in 1992, has continued to grow in popularity in the UK. It is one of an increasing number of radio stations (for example Classic FM
in the Netherlands) that usually limit themselves to popular classics, and normally exclude works that may be highly acclaimed by music critics but are not popular with the general public.
The internet has also increased the availability of classical music in the present century. Not only are there sites that allow listeners to tune into radio stations or sample composers' works, there are many sites that allow their members to download music onto their computer or onto other devices, such as MP3 players.
during the 21st century, home-based composers and performers are no longer limited to the facilities of designated recording studio
s. Though the technology was available in the 1990s, home computers were not capable of replicating the functionality of a professional production facility. At that time computer processors were slow, internal memory
was small, hard disk storage capacities were limited, and data access time
s were too slow for serious multitrack recording
work if using only a single device. Today's computer workstations have vastly improved performance capabilities, with data storage space in the region of several terabyte
s, processors with multiple cores, and onboard memory measured in gigabytes. Home users can now quickly and easily sample, record, and produce their own music using their own home recording
studios, and promote it via the internet.
There are numerous types of application involved in music production. While many will allow the user to play musical notation back via MIDI (through either external electronic instruments or internal "virtual instrument
s"), some of them are dedicated solely to notation, others are dedicated solely to live performance, yet others are dedicated solely to the production
(i.e. recording) process itself, while a few present all these capabilities in one package. Many of these applications have capabilities to store live sound in WAV
, MP3
, or MP4 format (which do not involve notation at all) and often have functions which can transform the sound (changing the pitch, stretching the sound, merging sounds together, adding effects, and so on). Of course, there are widely used applications which are dedicated to recording sound in digital formats, and some offer these transforming functions.
Classical music
Classical music is the art music produced in, or rooted in, the traditions of Western liturgical and secular music, encompassing a broad period from roughly the 11th century to present times...
is a diverse art form. Some elements of the previous century have been retained but there is a growing move towards post-modernism, polystylism
Polystylism
Polystylism is the use of multiple styles or techniques in literature, art, film, or, especially, music, and is a postmodern characteristic.Some prominent contemporary polystylist composers include Peter Maxwell Davies, Michael Colgrass, Lera Auerbach, Sofia Gubaidulina, George Rochberg, Alfred...
and eclecticism
Eclecticism in music
Eclecticism is used to describe a composer's conscious use of styles alien to his nature, or from one or more historical styles. The term is also used pejoratively to describe music whose composer, thought to be lacking originality, appears to have freely drawn on other models .-Sources:* Kennedy,...
, which seek to incorporate elements of all styles of music irrespective of whether these are "classical" or not—these efforts represent a slackening differentiation between the various musical genres
Music genre
A music genre is a categorical and typological construct that identifies musical sounds as belonging to a particular category and type of music that can be distinguished from other types of music...
. Pop, jazz, rock, and others are seen as styles to be used in any work, rather than as separate disciplines. The combination of classical music and multimedia
Multimedia
Multimedia is media and content that uses a combination of different content forms. The term can be used as a noun or as an adjective describing a medium as having multiple content forms. The term is used in contrast to media which use only rudimentary computer display such as text-only, or...
is also a notable practice in the 21st century; the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
, alongside its related technology, are important resources in this respect. The number of important women composers has also increased significantly.
Music in the 21st century
For its October 2009 edition, the BBC Music MagazineBBC music magazine
BBC Music Magazine is a magazine published monthly in the United Kingdom by BBC Worldwide, the commercial subsidiary of the BBC. Reflecting the broadcast output of BBC Radio 3, the magazine is devoted primarily to classical music, though with sections on jazz and world music. Each edition comes...
asked 10 composers, mostly British, to discuss the latest trends in western classical music. The consensus was that no particular style is favoured and that individuality is to be encouraged. The magazine interviewed Brian Ferneyhough
Brian Ferneyhough
Brian John Peter Ferneyhough is an English composer. His music is characterized by the extensive use of complex rhythmic tuplet notation which features in all his works...
, Michael Nyman
Michael Nyman
Michael Laurence Nyman, CBE is an English composer of minimalist music, pianist, librettist and musicologist, known for the many film scores he wrote during his lengthy collaboration with the filmmaker Peter Greenaway, and his multi-platinum soundtrack album to Jane Campion's The Piano...
, Einojuhani Rautavaara
Einojuhani Rautavaara
Einojuhani Rautavaara is a Finnish composer of contemporary classical music, and is one of the most notable Finnish composers after Jean Sibelius.-Life:...
, Henri Dutilleux
Henri Dutilleux
Henri Dutilleux is one of the most important French composers of the second half of the 20th century, producing work in the tradition of Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, and Albert Roussel, but in a style distinctly his own...
, John Adams, James MacMillan, Jonathan Harvey
Jonathan Harvey (composer)
Jonathan Harvey is a British composer. He has held teaching positions at universities and music conservatories in Europe and the USA and is frequently invited to teach in summer schools around the world.-Life:...
, Julian Anderson
Julian Anderson
Julian Anderson is a British composer and teacher of composition.-Biography:Anderson studied at Westminster School, then with John Lambert at the Royal College of Music, with Alexander Goehr at Cambridge University, privately with Tristan Murail in Paris, and on courses given by Olivier Messiaen,...
, John Tavener
John Tavener
Sir John Tavener is a British composer, best known for such religious, minimal works as "The Whale", and "Funeral Ikos"...
, and Roxanna Panufnik
Roxanna Panufnik
Roxanna Panufnik is a British composer of Polish heritage. She is the daughter of the composer and conductor Sir Andrzej Panufnik....
. The works of each of these composers represent different aspects of the music of this century but these composers all came to the same basic conclusion: music is too diverse to categorise or limit. In his interview with the magazine, Dutilleux argued that "there is only good or bad music, whether serious or popular".
Anderson, a British composer, uses popular house
House music
House music is a genre of electronic dance music that originated in Chicago, Illinois, United States in the early 1980s. It was initially popularized in mid-1980s discothèques catering to the African-American, Latino American, and gay communities; first in Chicago circa 1984, then in other...
and club music as the basis for many of his compositions. Indeed works such as Khorovod (1994) seem to anticipate the modern trend. His music combines the music of traditional cultures from outside the western concert tradition with elements of modernism
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
, spectral music
Spectral music
Spectral music is a musical composition practice where compositional decisions are often informed by the analysis of sound spectra. Computer-based sound spectrum analysis using tools like DFT, FFT, and spectrograms...
and electronic music
Electronic music
Electronic music is music that employs electronic musical instruments and electronic music technology in its production. In general a distinction can be made between sound produced using electromechanical means and that produced using electronic technology. Examples of electromechanical sound...
. His large-scale Book of Hours for 20 players and live electronics premiered in 2005.
Tavener, another British composer, draws his inspiration from eastern mysticism
Eastern mysticism
Eastern mysticism or Eastern spirituality is a broad and largely Western concept summarizing and sometimes amalgamating mystic traditions of the Middle East, the Indian Subcontinent and the Far East, a separate realm from Western mysticism...
and the music of the Orthodox Church.
Nyman is an English minimalist
Minimalist music
Minimal music is a style of music associated with the work of American composers La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass. It originated in the New York Downtown scene of the 1960s and was initially viewed as a form of experimental music called the New York Hypnotic School....
best known for his film score
Film score
A film score is original music written specifically to accompany a film, forming part of the film's soundtrack, which also usually includes dialogue and sound effects...
for The Piano
The Piano
The Piano is a 1993 New Zealand drama film about a mute pianist and her daughter, set during the mid-19th century in a rainy, muddy frontier backwater on the west coast of New Zealand. The film was written and directed by Jane Campion, and stars Holly Hunter, Harvey Keitel, Sam Neill, and Anna Paquin...
. He often borrows from Baroque music
Baroque music
Baroque music describes a style of Western Classical music approximately extending from 1600 to 1760. This era follows the Renaissance and was followed in turn by the Classical era...
and is an acclaimed composer of operas, including (in this century) Facing Goya
Facing Goya
Facing Goya is an opera in four acts by Michael Nyman on a libretto by Victoria Hardie. It is an expansion of their one-act opera called Vital Statistics from 1987, dealing with such subjects as physiognomy and its practitioners, and also incorporates a musical motif from Nyman's art song, "The...
and Sparkie
Sparkie
Sparkie Williams was a talking budgie who provided the inspiration for a new opera by Michael Nyman and Carsten Nicolai. The opera was performed in Berlin in March 2009...
. The latter work draws its inspiration from a talking
Talking bird
Talking birds are birds that can mimic human speech. Talking birds have varying degrees of intelligence and communication capabilities: some, like the crow, a highly intelligent bird, are only able to mimic a few words and phrases, whilst some budgerigars have been observed to have a vocabulary of...
budgie
Budgerigar
The Budgerigar , also known as Common Pet Parakeet or Shell Parakeet informally nicknamed the budgie, is a small, long-tailed, seed-eating parrot, and the only species in the Australian genus Melopsittacus...
. His shorter works often written for his own Michael Nyman Band
Michael Nyman Band
The Michael Nyman Band, formerly known as the Campiello Band, is a group formed as a street band for a 1976 production of Carlo Goldoni's 1756 play, Il Campiello directed by Bill Bryden at the Old Vic...
.
Often styled the "Father of New Complexity
New Complexity
In music, the New Complexity is a term dating from the 1980s, principally applied to composers seeking a "complex, multi-layered interplay of evolutionary processes occurring simultaneously within every dimension of the musical material" ....
", English composer Brian Ferneyhough
Brian Ferneyhough
Brian John Peter Ferneyhough is an English composer. His music is characterized by the extensive use of complex rhythmic tuplet notation which features in all his works...
has recently started writing works which reference those of past composers. His Dum transisset are based on Elizabethan composer Christopher Tye
Christopher Tye
Christopher Tye was an English composer and organist, who studied at Cambridge University and in 1545 became a Doctor of Music both there and at Oxford.He was choirmaster of Ely Cathedral from about 1543 and also organist there from 1559...
's works for viol
Viol
The viol is any one of a family of bowed, fretted and stringed musical instruments developed in the mid-late 15th century and used primarily in the Renaissance and Baroque periods. The family is related to and descends primarily from the Renaissance vihuela, a plucked instrument that preceded the...
; the fourth string quartet references Schönberg
Arnold Schoenberg
Arnold Schoenberg was an Austrian composer, associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School...
. His opera Shadowtime (libretto by Charles Bernstein
Charles Bernstein
Charles Bernstein is an American poet, theorist, editor, and literary scholar. Bernstein holds the Donald T. Regan Chair in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is one of the most prominent members of the Language poets . In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the American...
), which premiered in Munich in 2004, is based on the life of the German philosopher Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German-Jewish intellectual, who functioned variously as a literary critic, philosopher, sociologist, translator, radio broadcaster and essayist...
.
Rautavaara is a Finnish composer writing in a variety of forms and styles. His opera Rasputin premiered in 2003 and he has written a large—and rapidly growing—body of orchestral and chamber works.
Active since the mid-1940s, the French composer Dutilleux follows the Impressionist
Impressionist music
Impressionism in music was a tendency in European classical music, mainly in France, which appeared in the late nineteenth century and continued into the middle of the twentieth century. Similarly to its precursor in the visual arts, musical impressionism focuses on a suggestion and an atmosphere...
and Neoclassical
Neoclassicism (music)
Neoclassicism in music was a twentieth-century trend, particularly current in the period between the two World Wars, in which composers sought to return to aesthetic precepts associated with the broadly defined concept of "classicism", namely order, balance, clarity, economy, and emotional restraint...
tradition of Maurice Ravel
Maurice Ravel
Joseph-Maurice Ravel was a French composer known especially for his melodies, orchestral and instrumental textures and effects...
, Claude Debussy
Claude Debussy
Claude-Achille Debussy was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures working within the field of impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions...
, and Albert Roussel
Albert Roussel
Albert Charles Paul Marie Roussel was a French composer. He spent seven years as a midshipman, turned to music as an adult, and became one of the most prominent French composers of the interwar period...
. His latest works include Correspondances and Le temps l'horloge
Le Temps L'Horloge
Le temps l'horloge is a work for soprano and orchestra, written by French composer Henri Dutilleux, who composed the three songs in this cycle between 2006 and 2007...
, both of which are song cycle
Song cycle
A song cycle is a group of songs designed to be performed in a sequence as a single entity. As a rule, all of the songs are by the same composer and often use words from the same poet or lyricist. Unification can be achieved by a narrative or a persona common to the songs, or even, as in Schumann's...
s.
John Adams is a Pulitzer Prize
Pulitzer Prize for Music
The Pulitzer Prize for Music was first awarded in 1943. Joseph Pulitzer did not call for such a prize in his will, but had arranged for a music scholarship to be awarded each year...
-winning American composer with strong roots in minimalism. His best-known recent works include On the Transmigration of Souls
On the Transmigration of Souls
On the Transmigration of Souls, for orchestra, chorus, children’s choir and pre-recorded tape is a composition by composer John Adams commissioned by The New York Philharmonic and Lincoln Center’s Great Performers shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks.Adams began writing the piece in...
(2002), a choral piece commemorating the victims of the 11 September 2001 attacks (for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Music
Pulitzer Prize for Music
The Pulitzer Prize for Music was first awarded in 1943. Joseph Pulitzer did not call for such a prize in his will, but had arranged for a music scholarship to be awarded each year...
in 2003) and Doctor Atomic
Doctor Atomic
Doctor Atomic is an opera by the contemporary American composer John Adams, with libretto by Peter Sellars. It premiered at the San Francisco Opera on 1 October 2005. The work focuses on the great stress and anxiety experienced by those at Los Alamos while the test of the first atomic bomb was...
(2005), which covers Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Oppenheimer
Julius Robert Oppenheimer was an American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Along with Enrico Fermi, he is often called the "father of the atomic bomb" for his role in the Manhattan Project, the World War II project that developed the first...
, the Manhattan Project
Manhattan Project
The Manhattan Project was a research and development program, led by the United States with participation from the United Kingdom and Canada, that produced the first atomic bomb during World War II. From 1942 to 1946, the project was under the direction of Major General Leslie Groves of the US Army...
, and the building of the first atomic bomb. In October 2008, Adams told BBC Radio 3 that he had been blacklisted by the U.S. Homeland Security department and immigration services.
MacMillan is a Scottish composer and conductor influenced by both traditional Scottish music
Music of Scotland
Scotland is internationally known for its traditional music, which has remained vibrant throughout the 20th century, when many traditional forms worldwide lost popularity to pop music...
and his own Roman Catholic
Roman Catholic Church
The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the world's largest Christian church, with over a billion members. Led by the Pope, it defines its mission as spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ, administering the sacraments and exercising charity...
faith. His most recent works include operas (The Sacrifice
The Sacrifice (opera)
The Sacrifice is an opera in three acts composed by James MacMillan with a libretto by the poet Michael Symmons Roberts based on the Branwen story of the Welsh myth collection, the Mabinogion. The world premiere took place on 22 September 2007 at the Donald Gordon Theatre of the Wales Millennium...
premiered in 2007) and a St John Passion (2008).
Harvey, a British composer, was Composer-in-Association with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra is a broadcasting symphony orchestra based in Glasgow, Scotland. One of five full-time orchestras maintained by the British Broadcasting Corporation , it is the oldest full-time professional orchestra in Scotland...
from 2005-2008. His 21st-century works include the large-scale cantata Mothers shall not Cry (2000), written for the BBC Proms
The Proms
The Proms, more formally known as The BBC Proms, or The Henry Wood Promenade Concerts presented by the BBC, is an eight-week summer season of daily orchestral classical music concerts and other events held annually, predominantly in the Royal Albert Hall in London...
Millennium, and the orchestral works Body Mandala (2006) and Speakings (2008).
Polish composer Roxanna Panufnik
Roxanna Panufnik
Roxanna Panufnik is a British composer of Polish heritage. She is the daughter of the composer and conductor Sir Andrzej Panufnik....
, the daughter of Sir Andrzej Panufnik
Andrzej Panufnik
Sir Andrzej Panufnik was a Polish composer, pianist, conductor and pedagogue. He became established as one of the leading Polish composers, and as a conductor he was instrumental in the re-establishment of the Warsaw Philharmonic orchestra after World War II...
, is one of the growing number of important women working in 21st-century composition. Her output includes operas, ballets, music theatre, choral works, chamber music, and music for film and television. Her most widely performed works include Westminster Mass, commissioned for Westminster Cathedral Choir on the occasion of Cardinal Hume's 75th birthday, The Music Programme, an opera for Polish National Opera's millennium season which received its UK premiere at the BOC Covent Garden Festival, and settings for solo voices and orchestra of Vikram Seth's Beastly Tales—the first of which was commissioned by the BBC for Patricia Rozario and City of London Sinfonia. The 2008/9 season has seen no less than 18 premieres of her works in nine different countries, performed by such diverse artists such as the Mobius Ensemble, Tasmin Little
Tasmin Little
Tasmin Little is an English violinist.She studied under Pauline Scott at the Yehudi Menuhin School and later at the Guildhall School of Music, coming to prominence as a string section finalist in the 1982 BBC Young Musician of the Year competition...
with the Orchestra of the Swan, The Sixteen
The Sixteen
The Sixteen are a choir and period instrument orchestra; founded by Harry Christophers in 1979.The group's special reputation for performing early English polyphony, masterpieces of the Renaissance, bringing fresh insights into Baroque and early Classical music and a diversity of 20th century...
, the Dante Quartet, the Choir of King's College Cambridge, and Valery Gergiev
Valery Gergiev
Valery Abisalovich Gergiev is a Russian conductor and opera company director. He is general director and artistic director of the Mariinsky Theatre, principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, and artistic director of the White Nights Festival in St. Petersburg.- Early life :Gergiev,...
conducting the World Orchestra for Peace.
Women composers
Although women have been composers in earlier centuries (Hildegard of BingenHildegard of Bingen
Blessed Hildegard of Bingen , also known as Saint Hildegard, and Sibyl of the Rhine, was a German writer, composer, philosopher, Christian mystic, Benedictine abbess, visionary, and polymath. Elected a magistra by her fellow nuns in 1136, she founded the monasteries of Rupertsberg in 1150 and...
, Francesca Caccini
Francesca Caccini
Francesca Caccini was an Italian composer, singer, lutenist, poet, and music teacher of the early Baroque era. She was the daughter of Giulio Caccini, and was one of the best-known and most influential female European composers between Hildegard of Bingen in the 12th century and the 19th century...
, Clara Schumann
Clara Schumann
Clara Schumann was a German musician and composer, considered one of the most distinguished pianists of the Romantic era...
, Fanny Mendelssohn
Fanny Mendelssohn
Fanny Cäcilie Mendelssohn , later Fanny Hensel, was a German pianist and composer, the sister of the composer Felix Mendelssohn and granddaughter of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn...
, and Amy Beach
Amy Beach
Amy Marcy Cheney Beach was an American composer and pianist. She was the first successful American female composer of large-scale art music. Most of her compositions and performances were under the name Mrs. H.H.A. Beach.-Early years:Beach was born Amy Marcy Cheney in Henniker, New Hampshire into...
are well-known examples), the 21st century has seen an increase in their number and importance. Roxanna Panufnik, in the aforementioned interview with the BBC, says:
The trend started in the latter quarter of the 20th century when Musgrave was joined by such prominent composers as Weir, LeFanu, Sofia Gubaidulina
Sofia Gubaidulina
Sofia Asgatovna Gubaidulina, is a Russian composer of half Russian, half Tatar ethnicity.Gubaidulina's music is marked by the use of unusual instrumental combinations...
, Pauline Oliveros
Pauline Oliveros
Pauline Oliveros is an American accordionist and composer who is a central figure in the development of post-war electronic art music....
, Meredith Monk
Meredith Monk
Meredith Jane Monk is an American composer, performer, director, vocalist, filmmaker, and choreographer. Since the 1960s, Monk has created multi-disciplinary works which combine music, theatre, and dance, recording extensively for ECM Records.-Life and work:Meredith Monk is primarily known for her...
, Maryanne Amacher
Maryanne Amacher
Maryanne Amacher was an American composer and installation artist.-Biography:Amacher was born in Kane, Pennsylvania, to an American nurse and a Swiss freight train worker. As the only child, she grew up playing the piano. Amacher left Kane to attend the University of Pennsylvania on a full...
, Kaija Saariaho
Kaija Saariaho
Kaija Saariaho is a Finnish composer.Kaija Saariaho studied composition in Helsinki, Freiburg and Paris, where she has lived since 1982. Her studies and research at IRCAM have had a major influence on her music and her characteristically luxuriant and mysterious textures are often created by...
and Joan Tower
Joan Tower
Joan Tower is a Grammy-winning contemporary American composer, concert pianist and conductor. Lauded by the New Yorker as "one of the most successful woman composers of all time", her bold and energetic compositions have been performed in concert halls around the world...
—many of whom are only now becoming recognised as important. The trend continues with such people as Panufnik, Davies, Hall, Onutė Narbutaitė
Onute Narbutaite
Onutė Narbutaitė is a Lithuanian composer. She graduated in 1979 and from the early 1980s has been working as a freelance composer in Vilnius. Her compositions include Sinfonia col triangolo, completed in 1996...
, Julia Wolfe
Julia Wolfe
Julia Wolfe is an American composer. She was born in Philadelphia, holds degrees from the University of Michigan, Princeton and Yale, and currently works in New York. Wolfe's music is rhythmically vigorous and often clangorously dissonant...
, Jennifer Higdon
Jennifer Higdon
Jennifer Higdon is an American composer of classical music. Higdon has received many awards, including the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Music for her Violin Concerto and the 2010 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition for her Percussion Concerto.-Biography:Higdon was born in Brooklyn,...
, Olga Neuwirth
Olga Neuwirth
Olga Neuwirth is an Austrian composer.As a child at the age of seven, Neuwirth began lessons on trumpet. She later studied composition in Vienna at the Vienna Academy of Music and Performing Arts under Erich Urbanner, while studying at the Electroacoustic Institute...
, Rebecca Saunders
Rebecca Saunders
-Biography:Saunders studied violin and composition at the University of Edinburgh. This was followed by a scholarship from the DAAD from 1991 to 1994 to study composition at the Hochschule für Musik Karlsruhe with Wolfgang Rihm, and in 1997 a doctorate in composition with Nigel Osborne.She has...
, and many others joining the ranks.
Yoko Shimomura
Yoko Shimomura
is a Japanese video game composer. She has been described as "the most famous female video game music composer in the world". She has worked in the video game music industry since graduating from Osaka College of Music in 1988...
is one of the most famous classical composers in Japan. Other notable composers include Kinuyo Yamashita
Kinuyo Yamashita
is a Japanese video game music composer and sound producer. Her best known soundtrack is Konami's Castlevania, which was also her debut work. She was credited under the pseudonym James Banana for her work on the Nintendo Entertainment System version of the game....
and Yoko Kanno
Yoko Kanno
is a composer, arranger and musician best known for her work on the soundtracks for many games, anime films, TV series, live-action movies, and advertisements...
.
Polystylism
Polystylism (or musical eclecticismEclecticism in music
Eclecticism is used to describe a composer's conscious use of styles alien to his nature, or from one or more historical styles. The term is also used pejoratively to describe music whose composer, thought to be lacking originality, appears to have freely drawn on other models .-Sources:* Kennedy,...
) is a growing trend in the 21st century. It combines elements of diverse musical genres and compositional techniques into a unified and coherent body of works. Composers will not necessarily employ their entire canon of style and technique in one single work, but rather the composers' body of works as a whole will reveal many different and diverse "styles". While anticipated by earlier trends that incorporated elements of folk music or jazz into classical works, polystylism increased its diversity, as well as its visibility, as it embraced more and more styles in the new century. Composers have often started their musical career in one discipline and have later migrated to or embraced others, while retaining important elements from the former discipline. In some cases, a composer now labelled "classical" may have started out in another discipline. Paul McCartney
Paul McCartney
Sir James Paul McCartney, MBE, Hon RAM, FRCM is an English musician, singer-songwriter and composer. Formerly of The Beatles and Wings , McCartney is listed in Guinness World Records as the "most successful musician and composer in popular music history", with 60 gold discs and sales of 100...
has made a similar move from pop music
Pop music
Pop music is usually understood to be commercially recorded music, often oriented toward a youth market, usually consisting of relatively short, simple songs utilizing technological innovations to produce new variations on existing themes.- Definitions :David Hatch and Stephen Millward define pop...
: he began his career as a member of The Beatles
The Beatles
The Beatles were an English rock band, active throughout the 1960s and one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music. Formed in Liverpool, by 1962 the group consisted of John Lennon , Paul McCartney , George Harrison and Ringo Starr...
and has recently composed Standing Stone and Ecce Cor Meum
Ecce Cor Meum
Ecce Cor Meum is the fourth classical album by Paul McCartney. The album was released on 25 September 2006 by EMI Classics...
. A specific label for John Zorn
John Zorn
John Zorn is an American avant-garde composer, arranger, record producer, saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist. Zorn is a prolific artist: he has hundreds of album credits as performer, composer, or producer...
's music is difficult to choose: he started out as a performance art
Performance art
In art, performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or...
ist and moved through various genres including jazz, hardcore punk
Hardcore punk
Hardcore punk is an underground music genre that originated in the late 1970s, following the mainstream success of punk rock. Hardcore is generally faster, thicker, and heavier than earlier punk rock. The origin of the term "hardcore punk" is uncertain. The Vancouver-based band D.O.A...
, film music
Film score
A film score is original music written specifically to accompany a film, forming part of the film's soundtrack, which also usually includes dialogue and sound effects...
, and classical, and often embraces Jewish musical elements. All of these diverse styles appear in his works.
Julian Anderson
Julian Anderson
Julian Anderson is a British composer and teacher of composition.-Biography:Anderson studied at Westminster School, then with John Lambert at the Royal College of Music, with Alexander Goehr at Cambridge University, privately with Tristan Murail in Paris, and on courses given by Olivier Messiaen,...
combines elements from many different musical genres and practices in his works. Elements of modernism
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
, spectral music and electronic music
Electronic music
Electronic music is music that employs electronic musical instruments and electronic music technology in its production. In general a distinction can be made between sound produced using electromechanical means and that produced using electronic technology. Examples of electromechanical sound...
are combined with elements of the folk music of Eastern Europe and the resulting works are often influenced by the modality of Indian ragas.
Tansy Davies
Tansy Davies
Tansy Davies is a British composer.As a youth, Davies sang and played guitar in a rock band. She developed an interest in composition in her teens, and subsequently began music studies at the Colchester Institute in French horn and composition...
's music also fuses elements of pop and classical music. Prince
Prince (musician)
Prince Rogers Nelson , often known simply as Prince, is an American singer, songwriter, musician, and actor. Prince has produced ten platinum albums and thirty Top 40 singles during his career. Prince founded his own recording studio and label; writing, self-producing and playing most, or all, of...
and Iannis Xenakis
Iannis Xenakis
Iannis Xenakis was a Romanian-born Greek ethnic, naturalized French composer, music theorist, and architect-engineer. He is commonly recognized as one of the most important post-war avant-garde composers...
are both major influences.
Multimedia and music
The work In Seven Days (2008), by Thomas AdèsThomas Adès
Thomas Adès is a British composer, pianist and conductor.-Biography:Adès studied piano with Paul Berkowitz and later composition with Robert Saxton at Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London...
, was composed for a piano, an orchestra, and six video screens. The video segments were created by Tal Rosner
Tal Rosner
Tal Rosner is a London based filmmaker and video artist.Rosner is a graduate of Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem and Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London ....
, Adès's civil partner.
Judith Weir
Judith Weir
Judith Weir CBE, is a British composer.-Biography:Her music has been appreciated by audiences and critics alike. She trained with John Tavener while still at school and subsequently with Robin Holloway at King's College, Cambridge, graduating in 1976...
's opera Armida
Armida (Weir)
Armida is an opera by British composer Judith Weir. It premiered on 25 December 2005 as a television broadcast on the UK station, Channel 4 which had commissioned the work...
was premiered on television, rather than on stage. Channel 4
Channel 4
Channel 4 is a British public-service television broadcaster which began working on 2 November 1982. Although largely commercially self-funded, it is ultimately publicly owned; originally a subsidiary of the Independent Broadcasting Authority , the station is now owned and operated by the Channel...
commissioned the work in 2005. The libretto, also written by Weir, updates Torquato Tasso
Torquato Tasso
Torquato Tasso was an Italian poet of the 16th century, best known for his poem La Gerusalemme liberata , in which he depicts a highly imaginative version of the combats between Christians and Muslims at the end of the First Crusade, during the siege of Jerusalem...
's 1581 epic poem, setting it in a modern Middle-East conflict which alludes to but never specifically mentions the Iraq War. Weir's opera calls for props that could not be used practically in an opera house, such as a helicopter.
In 2008, Tan Dun
Tan Dun
Tan Dun is a Chinese contemporary classical composer, most widely known for his scores for the movies Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero.-Early life in China:...
was commissioned by Google to compose Internet Symphony No. 1 - "Eroica" to be performed collaboratively by the YouTube Symphony Orchestra. This work used the internet to recruit orchestra members and the final result was compiled into a mashup video, which premiered worldwide on YouTube.
Film-score and TV-theme-music composers who also write classical music
Howard GoodallHoward Goodall
210px|thumb|Howard Goodall at St. John the Baptist Church in Devon, United Kingdom, May 2009Howard Lindsay Goodall CBE is a British composer of musicals, choral music and music for television...
is best known for his theme music for popular TV series. He is Classic FM's Composer-in-Residence for 2009 and was named Composer of the Year at the Classical BRIT Awards
Classical Brit Awards
The Classic BRIT Awards are an annual awards ceremony held in the United Kingdom covering aspects of classical music, and are the classical equivalent of pop music's BRIT Awards....
in 2009. He has also written classical choral works. Karl Jenkins
Karl Jenkins
-Other works:*Adiemus: Live — live versions of Adiemus music*Palladio *Eloise *Imagined Oceans *The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace...
started out as a Jazz musician and later composed for television advertisement
Television advertisement
A television advertisement or television commercial, often just commercial, advert, ad, or ad-film – is a span of television programming produced and paid for by an organization that conveys a message, typically one intended to market a product...
s, most notably for De Beers
De Beers
De Beers is a family of companies that dominate the diamond, diamond mining, diamond trading and industrial diamond manufacturing sectors. De Beers is active in every category of industrial diamond mining: open-pit, underground, large-scale alluvial, coastal and deep sea...
diamond
Diamond
In mineralogy, diamond is an allotrope of carbon, where the carbon atoms are arranged in a variation of the face-centered cubic crystal structure called a diamond lattice. Diamond is less stable than graphite, but the conversion rate from diamond to graphite is negligible at ambient conditions...
merchants. The music was included as the title track of the album Diamond Music
Diamond Music
Diamond Music is a 1996 album by Welsh composer Karl Jenkins.Perhaps one of Jenkins most recognized works is the first movement of the "Palladio" suite, inspired by 16th-century architect Andrea Palladio and in the style of a concerto grosso...
. He has since written several important classical works for chorus and orchestra, including The Armed Man
The Armed Man
The Armed Man is a Mass by Welsh composer Karl Jenkins, subtitled "A Mass for Peace". The piece was commissioned by the Royal Armouries Museum for the Millennium celebrations, and to mark the museum's move from London to Leeds, and it was dedicated to victims of the Kosovo crisis...
: A Mass for Peace.
Listening to music in the 21st century
Classic FMClassic FM (UK)
Classic FM, one of the United Kingdom's three Independent National Radio stations, broadcasts classical music in a popular and accessible style.-Overview:...
, which launched in 1992, has continued to grow in popularity in the UK. It is one of an increasing number of radio stations (for example Classic FM
Classic FM (Netherlands)
Classic FM is a classical music radio station in the Netherlands, which at one time broadcast on FM, but is now available nationally on cable and internationally on the Internet....
in the Netherlands) that usually limit themselves to popular classics, and normally exclude works that may be highly acclaimed by music critics but are not popular with the general public.
The internet has also increased the availability of classical music in the present century. Not only are there sites that allow listeners to tune into radio stations or sample composers' works, there are many sites that allow their members to download music onto their computer or onto other devices, such as MP3 players.
Technology in music production
With the growing popularity of the home computer and the vast improvements in music production applicationsApplication software
Application software, also known as an application or an "app", is computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks. Examples include enterprise software, accounting software, office suites, graphics software and media players. Many application programs deal principally with...
during the 21st century, home-based composers and performers are no longer limited to the facilities of designated recording studio
Recording studio
A recording studio is a facility for sound recording and mixing. Ideally both the recording and monitoring spaces are specially designed by an acoustician to achieve optimum acoustic properties...
s. Though the technology was available in the 1990s, home computers were not capable of replicating the functionality of a professional production facility. At that time computer processors were slow, internal memory
Ram
-Animals:*Ram, an uncastrated male sheep*Ram cichlid, a species of freshwater fish endemic to Colombia and Venezuela-Military:*Battering ram*Ramming, a military tactic in which one vehicle runs into another...
was small, hard disk storage capacities were limited, and data access time
Access time
Access time is the time delay or latency between a request to an electronic system, and the access being completed or the requested data returned....
s were too slow for serious multitrack recording
Multitrack recording
Multitrack recording is a method of sound recording that allows for the separate recording of multiple sound sources to create a cohesive whole...
work if using only a single device. Today's computer workstations have vastly improved performance capabilities, with data storage space in the region of several terabyte
Terabyte
The terabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The prefix tera means 1012 in the International System of Units , and therefore 1 terabyte is , or 1 trillion bytes, or 1000 gigabytes. 1 terabyte in binary prefixes is 0.9095 tebibytes, or 931.32 gibibytes...
s, processors with multiple cores, and onboard memory measured in gigabytes. Home users can now quickly and easily sample, record, and produce their own music using their own home recording
Home recording
Home recording is the practice of recording in a private home, rather than in a professional recording studio. A studio set up for home recording is called a "project studio" or "home studio". Home recording is practiced by indie bands, singer-songwriters, hobbyists, podcasters, documentarians,...
studios, and promote it via the internet.
There are numerous types of application involved in music production. While many will allow the user to play musical notation back via MIDI (through either external electronic instruments or internal "virtual instrument
Software synthesizer
A software synthesizer, also known as a softsynth is a computer program or plug-in for digital audio generation. Computer software which can create sounds or music is not new, but advances in processing speed are allowing softsynths to accomplish the same tasks that previously required dedicated...
s"), some of them are dedicated solely to notation, others are dedicated solely to live performance, yet others are dedicated solely to the production
Record producer
A record producer is an individual working within the music industry, whose job is to oversee and manage the recording of an artist's music...
(i.e. recording) process itself, while a few present all these capabilities in one package. Many of these applications have capabilities to store live sound in WAV
WAV
Waveform Audio File Format , is a Microsoft and IBM audio file format standard for storing an audio bitstream on PCs...
, MP3
MP3
MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...
, or MP4 format (which do not involve notation at all) and often have functions which can transform the sound (changing the pitch, stretching the sound, merging sounds together, adding effects, and so on). Of course, there are widely used applications which are dedicated to recording sound in digital formats, and some offer these transforming functions.