Marginalized in the wake of musicology's belated postmodernist turn and the object of frequent criticism from the now not-so-new ‘new musicology’, late-modernist music studies may have seemed destined to follow new music into the silence that Theodor Adorno famously prophesied. Yet in addition to the incontestable persistence of modernist outlooks in today's contemporary music scene, the past decade has also seen several scholarly attempts to reassess modernism's – especially post-war modernism's – continued relevance and repercussions.Footnote ¹The Modernist Legacy: Essays on New Music furthers this project by bringing together twelve essays, most of which began life as papers delivered at the Fourth Biennial International Conference on Twentieth-Century Music at the University of Sussex in 2005. Focusing mainly on music written since 1970, a repertoire which, according to editor Björn Heile, has thus far been considered mostly from either analytical or journalistic standpoints, the essays address a range of familiar works and composers as well as lesser-known niches of new music under the general aesthetic rubric of late modernism.

Heile's introduction argues strongly against consigning the concept of modernism to the dustbin of history. He suggests that by assessing late twentieth-century new music from various perspectives this collection brings together ‘socially, historically and aesthetically oriented approaches with analytical methods in imaginative ways; it almost seems as if this music is being discussed in its full historical context for the first time’ (4). This particular claim to a wider historiographical scope may be somewhat overstated. Nevertheless, the contributions of British, European, and North American musicologists, theorists, composers, and critics combine to create a diverse set of essays that appraise aspects of modernist music from the recent past.

As with any such collected volume, conceptual coherence can prove elusive. The book is divided into two rather broad sections (‘New Music, Social Debates and the Aesthetics of Critical Modernism’ and ‘Aspects of Compositional Poetics’), though the reader may be more inclined to draw connections based on the four critical approaches that tend to stand out: discourse analysis, historical contextualism, close readings and formal analysis, and aesthetics and poetics. These are not strictly distinguished or divided; rather, they constitute the coordinates of the authors’ various methodological constellations.

Certain themes emerge alongside the broad categories provided by the two section titles. Several authors devote considerable attention to the place of modernist music under the conditions of late capitalism. The desire to give a broader account of the compositional diversity within late modernism and its engagement with particular social issues at certain historical moments is another overarching concern. Notably too, in relation to the creation and study of this repertoire, the collection registers a move away from the influence of Adornian aesthetics and critical theory and towards that of other (usually continental) philosophical or intellectual traditions.

Despite what the title of the book might suggest, most of the essays are concerned less with drawing connections between contemporary music and aspects of pre-war modernism than with broadening the sense of music's influences on, and interaction with, social and cultural concerns of the last several decades. The legacies of modernism as a concept are, however, central to the first two contributions. Examining moments of ostensible richness and ruin, Andrew Timms offers a critique of the historiography of modernism, while John Croft reflects on the poetics of the musical present.

Timms sifts through the historical treatment of modernism in musicological literature, where he finds it frequently condemned for purported formalism, positivism, or rationality. More pernicious still, he argues, is the continued identification of modernism with atonality, which allows those opposed to viewing atonality as a historical end point to dismiss modernism in the process. According to Timms, such scholars and critics thus construct the emergence of musical modernism as (borrowing Fredric Jameson's phrase) a ‘moment of plenitude’: ‘a period when tonality reached its historical completion and perfection – from which point onwards it decays or declines before reaching atonality’ (16). Timms not only urges us to differentiate among modernism's own internal histories but also, more pressingly, calls on scholars to rethink typical constructions of twentieth-century music history in which ‘the combination of tonality and modernity still remains the gravitational centre’ (24).

By contrast, Croft isolates the current problem as one of how to avoid the pluralistic ‘noise-stream’ of the millennial media environment, offering a composer's perspective on the present. While one response is to further the modernist exploration into the properties of sound (a tendency he locates in the work of Helmut Lachenmann and the spectralists), such an approach also risks the ‘unhappy descent […] from [the] initial jouissance of sonic exploration into effects and interestingness’ (30). Drawing on Giorgio Agamben and Jean-François Lyotard, Croft calls for a musical poetics that will ‘re-connect lived experience and action with environment and culture’ and unveil the fragments of past music as ‘material and energy rather than as sign’ (32). Acknowledging these utopian goals, Croft nevertheless highlights three traits of Salvatore Sciarrino's music that point towards a possible model: ‘environmental mimesis’, ‘visceral mimesis’, and the appearance of the musical past. This last, he suggests, is ‘distilled’ rather than distorted or problematized (34).

A further, and especially welcome, perspective is provided by composers and performers. Ian Pace, for example, in his essay ‘Verbal Discourse as Aesthetic Arbitrator in Contemporary Music’, scrutinizes the ways in which the discourse surrounding contemporary music negatively impinges on its creation and reception. He argues that the marketing and promotion of contemporary music typically shies away from engaging with the most distinctive qualities of a work, shifting attention instead to biography or other extramusical factors. Recalling Adorno, Pace finds contemporary music caught between its desire to remain a refuge for subjectivity in the current age and its discursive network, which would rather that it require minimal mediation and tend towards subjectivism.

The final three essays of the first half of the book continue the emphasis on discourse analysis found throughout this volume, while turning towards particular works and historical contexts from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Eric Drott (‘Spectralism, Politics and the Post-Industrial Imagination’), Beate Kutschke (‘The Scream in Avant-Garde Music: the New Left and the Rediscovery of the Body’), and Heile (‘Weltmusik and the Globalization of New Music’) also draw, for contextual depth and methodological support, on the writings of notable post-war thinkers not typically associated with modernist aesthetics. Of the essays in the collection these three have perhaps the most to offer in terms of intellectual and historical breadth. Although space occasionally constrains the range of contextual and musical questions that can be addressed, each author uncovers a number of new and compelling connections, influences, and intentions.

Drott examines spectralist composers’ writings not only as constative documents but also as performative statements that fulfil several functions, most notably that of recalling the genre of the avant-garde manifesto and self-consciously intervening in twentieth-century music history. Drott draws on Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of art, in particular his notions of the cultural field and homology, arguing that the spectralists attempted to situate themselves in a particular structural location within both the social space of post-’68 France and the field of contemporary music, then largely dominated by the institutional networks centred on Pierre Boulez. Furthermore, the spectralists actively sought to establish homologies with new social movements through references in their writings to notions such as ‘sound ecology’, ‘difference’, and ‘hybridity’. Bourdieusian concepts have long been methodological mainstays in ethnomusicology and music sociology, but less so in the study of late modernist music.Footnote ² Drott therefore provides an illuminating perspective on some of the social motivations and political contexts of spectralism, simultaneously issuing useful caveats against Bourdieu's own tendency to interpret all avant-garde movements as self-aggrandizing marketing manoeuvres.

Kutschke also peers at the spectres of ’68, particularly the links between the musical avant garde, popular psychology, and politics. Her essay is centred on Gerhard Stäbler's 1972–3 composition drüber …, for eight ‘active screamers’, cello, synthesizer, and tape. Prompted by the question of what might have inspired Stäbler to focus on screams – rather than the sighs, breathing, humming, or other extended techniques that sprang up in compositions during this time – Kutschke argues that screams had changed their meaning by the 1970s. This shift is traced partly to the popularity of Arthur Janov's Primal Therapy and its emphasis on releasing painful emotions from the unconscious, which Kutschke relates to the presence, in the score of drüber …, of indications of emotional stimuli but not of specified sounds. Kutschke's essay could have benefited from a more detailed discussion of the work, as she raises such compositional issues as the ‘quasi-motivic or syntactic function’ that Stäbler apparently attributes to the different screams and the existence of a ‘quasi-serial technique’ (67), neither of which is pursued. Turning instead to the New Left's ‘rediscovery of the body’, Kutschke suggests that after ’68 screaming was not only a ‘symbol or expression of protest, but also […] its method and instrument’ (72). Yet as a composed and rehearsed work, Stäbler's piece ends up occupying the dialectical position between ‘immediate expression and artistic or planned performance’ (74), or, as Kutschke further discusses, ‘semiotic authenticity’ and ‘natural authenticity’. Kutschke engages a range of broad cultural and theoretical topics, though a more detailed account of the New Left in Germany could have been provided for the English-language reader, as could a better sense of other comparable compositions of the time. For a fuller account of the musical avant garde and leftist politics in the 1960s and ’70s readers might wish to consult Kutschke's thorough German-language monograph.Footnote ³

Heile, in his own contribution to the volume, examines the relatively unexplored connections of new music and world musics, suggesting that the discourse of Weltmusik – a term in currency in 1960s German music circles – foreshadows and adds a historical dimension to current debates on globalization. He frames his essay with a discussion of Karlheinz Stockhausen's Telemusik (1966), which uses electronics to mix and manipulate recordings of various non-Western musics. The problematic rhetoric of pan-global, even temporal and universal unity in Stockhausen's commentary for the piece is traced back to the composer's adoption of media theorist Marshall McLuhan's ideas in the late 1960s and the latter's exclusive focus on the impact of new media rather than on the causes and power relations behind technological change. Heile provides a fresh perspective on the influences that shaped Stockhausen's intellectual position during this time, while helping to bridge the gap between English- and German-language new music, world music, and media discourses. He concludes his essay by putting forward ‘some suggestions as to what Deleuze and Guattari have to offer to a “musicology of globalization”’ (117). The application of Deleuzian thought to issues relating to globalization has been the subject of considerable interest and debate in recent years.Footnote ⁴ Heile's suggestions could have been bolstered by engaging with this scholarship, though this would probably have required a separate project.

In the second half of the book, which takes up aspects of compositional poetics and aesthetics in studies focused more on individual works and composers, Gilles Deleuze reappears alongside Theodor Adorno in Lois Fitch's examination of the two philosophers’ influence on the composition and writings of Brian Ferneyhough, and in particular the concept of immanence, of which the two philosophers have radically different understandings. The gulf between Deleuze and Adorno is also gauged in part by the notion of the subject, which Ferneyhough raises when he writes of the ideal musical work as something ‘entering into conversation with the listener as if it were another aware subject’ (162).Footnote ⁵ Fitch claims that Ferneyhough's writings take up the Adornian mantra that the material must make demands of the composer and listener as subjects; at the same time she draws on Deleuze's writings on Francis Bacon, particularly the idea of the independent pre-subjective force of the ‘figure’. Fitch suggests that Ferneyhough reveals himself to be a paradoxically ‘postmodern modernist’ through the convergences and contradictions that emerge in his attempt to bring two of the most influential twentieth-century thinkers and their respective traditions simultaneously to bear on compositional poetics.

While Fitch, Heile, and Croft turn in various ways to continental philosophy, Catherine Laws gives an intermedial perspective on late modernist aesthetics in her discussion of the ‘triangle of association’ between Morton Feldman, Samuel Beckett, and Jasper Johns. Musically she focuses on the large-scale structures, rhythmic ‘quasi-patterns’, and ‘endless circling’ in Feldman's Neither, in which she finds the cultivation of subjective instability and a condition of ‘betweenness’ (139). Devoting roughly equal space to the three figures, Laws traces the ways in which each plays with patterning and repetition, materiality, and subjectivity, and finds in their work a common concern with the process of individuation and the (im)possibility of self-presence.

Analytical studies round off this collection. Ève Poudrier contributes a thorough analysis of rhythm and polymetre in Elliott Carter's 90+ for piano (1994). Drawing on both cognitive studies and phenomenology, Poudrier's ability to elucidate the rhythmic and (poly)metric features of this work, while integrating aspects of pitch organization and formal articulation, lends credence to her claim that ‘unless rhythm and texture become better understood […] pitch structures will remain obscure’ in Carter's music (232).

John Dack prefaces his investigation of the ‘open’ form in Pousseur's tape composition Scambi (1957) with the stated intention to re-examine ‘the ideological foundations and technical procedures of open forms’ (177) and the claim that early open-form electronic and tape pieces such as Scambi ‘still have much to offer contemporary musical thought’ (180). While neither of these issues is as thoroughly explored as it might have been, Dack's most significant contribution is his meticulous parametric analysis and classification of the thirty-two discrete sections of the work, which allows for a fuller understanding of its formal logic and sonic detail. It further allows Dack to propose newly ordered realizations of this ‘open’ work in which continuity and formal articulation might be more keenly perceived.

If the 1950s was the heyday of tape-based composition and open form, Mark Delaere reminds us that a renewed interest in medieval music played an important role in both encouraging experimentation and establishing order in post-war music. To illustrate his point, he turns to a more recent work: Harrison Birtwistle's Hoquetus Petrus, written for Boulez's seventieth birthday. While analysis of pitch organization and hocket technique lies at the core of his essay, Delaere also offers several astute observations regarding stylistic references and allusions to Boulez and Machaut. These reveal the rich intertextuality of this work, and Delaere further ventures some hypotheses regarding compositional intention and hidden musical symbols, though not all of these will necessarily be convincing to readers. He concludes with a compelling suggestion regarding Ligeti's possible role in the work's genesis. Following the use of hocket in minimalist pieces of the 1970s, and especially Ligeti's ‘unproblematic, pastiche-like’ adoption of the procedure in the second movement of his Violin Concerto (1992), Delaere suggests that Birtwistle may have been compelled to ‘develop a personal, “modernist” and elaborate way to handle this historical technique’ (203).

David Osmond-Smith's elegant essay on Aldo Clementi, a composer seldom performed and studied in the Anglo-American world, was one of the last pieces he wrote before his death. Since he begins by invoking the twentieth century's ‘hermeneutic itch’, one might have expected him to wade into current musicological topics such as ‘presence’ or ‘performativity’. Although he does not do so explicitly, Osmond-Smith demonstrates that such concerns were nonetheless already very much a part of Clementi's particular modernist poetics and praxis. Osmond-Smith views Clementi's work as seeking a solution to the impasse posed by the irretrievable loss of the Benjaminian aura of art in the modern era and the death of the ‘openness to the risk of intimacy’ reflected in the decline of amateur music-making. Furthermore, he finds in the phenomenological particularity of Clementi's cut-up canonic techniques in Adagio cantabile for piano and twelve instruments (1989) ‘a theatre of our misrouted impulse […] toward reciprocal empathy’ (133).

This collection is a welcome addition to late modernist music studies and brings together a variety of perspectives, reaching beyond musicologists to include those actively engaged in shaping the continuation of the ‘modernist legacy’. The historical essays are noteworthy for their attempts to expand the discursive scope of late modernism's aesthetic and social dimensions, though their restricted length – an understandable drawback given their origins as conference papers – can leave them seeming constrained or rushed at times. Some of the formal analyses too translate less effectively to a non-presentation format. Despite the array of approaches and themes an unequivocal message seems to emerge: proclaiming a modernist legacy may in fact be premature. Indeed, in avoiding standard stylistic categories and engaging a wide range of topics The Modernist Legacy demonstrates that the new music of the last forty years raised and continues to raise issues that assure the relevance and vitality of contemporary musical modernism.