Defining Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Music

Clarke, David

doi:10.1017/s1478572217000342

Cited by 8 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 61 publications

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“…Although atonality does not apply to all styles of 20th/21st century music, it can be seen as one defining element of the avant-garde strand of modernist music that evolved in Vienna around 1911 and has influenced avant-garde music before 1945 and continues to influence avant-garde music up until today. In this article we therefore mainly speak of three types of music: (1) 20th/21st century art music (Clarke, 2017) is being used to refer to the entire phenomenon of 20th and 21st Western art music. In contrast, (2) the term ‘atonal music’ occurs in a more specific context, particularly in chapter 4 and 5, where the property of atonality (music that lacks a tonal centre; Forte, 1977; Forte, 1998) is a crucial aspect in our argumentation.…”

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Atonal Music: Can Uncertainty Lead to Pleasure?

et al. 2019

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In recent years, the field of neuroaesthetics has gained considerable attention with music being a favored object of study. The majority of studies concerning music have, however, focused on the experience of Western tonal music (TM), which is characterized by tonal hierarchical organization, a high degree of consonance, and a tendency to provide the listener with a tonic as a reference point during the listening experience. We argue that a narrow focus on Western TM may have led to a one-sided view regarding the qualities of the aesthetic experience of music since Western art music from the 20th and 21st century like atonal music (AM) – while lacking a tonal hierarchical structure, and while being highly dissonant and hard to predict – is nevertheless enjoyed by a group of avid listeners. We propose a research focus that investigates, in particular, the experience of AM as a novel and compelling way with which to enhance our understanding of both the aesthetic appreciation of music and the role of predictive models in the context of musical pleasure. We use music theoretical analysis and music information retrieval methods to demonstrate how AM presents the listener with a highly uncertain auditory environment. Specifically, an analysis of a corpus of 100 musical segments is used to illustrate how tonal classical music and AM differ quantitatively in terms of both key and pulse clarity values. We then examine person related, extrinsic and intrinsic factors, that point to potential mechanisms underlying the appreciation and pleasure derived from AM. We argue that personality traits like “openness to experience,” the framing of AM as art, and the mere exposure effect are key components of such mechanisms. We further argue that neural correlates of uncertainty estimation could represent a central mechanism for engaging with AM and that such contexts engender a comparatively weak predictive model in the listener. Finally we argue that in such uncertain contexts, correct predictions may be more subjectively rewarding than prediction errors since they signal to the individual that their predictive model is improving.

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Atonal Music: Can Uncertainty Lead to Pleasure?

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Institutions Against Art Music—Curation, Rehearsal, and Contemporary Art

Barrett

2023

Ästhetiken X.0 – Zeitgenössische Konturen Ästhetischen Denkens

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This chapter analyses the work of contemporary artists who use alternative institutions to challenge accepted notions of art music. Kevin Beasley’s 2019 curatorial collaboration with The Kitchen, Assembly, reframes heterogeneous musics as contemporary art through the transformational act of curation. In Rehearsing Philadelphia (2022), Ari Benjamin Meyers displays the process of musical rehearsal within temporary music organisations. The chapter contends that whereas Meyers devalues a range of music by refiguring it as rehearsal, Beasley and The Kitchen transvaluate musical practices historically understood as nonart into contemporary art—and, potentially, into art music—via the powers of the curator. Beyond calls to throw out labels and categories, such projects turn on the concrete determination of what art music is while implicating contemporary art in its potential critical reconstruction.

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Looking Towards the Future: Popular Music Studies and Music Scholarship

Wright¹,

Coddington²,

Mall³

2020

Twentieth-Century Music

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In the foreword to the first issue of Popular Music and Society, published in 1971, Ray B. Browne wrote that, ‘until very recently … academics, with a few notable exceptions, were by and large indifferent to the role of popular music in their world’; he then recounted a rejection he had received from an academic journal, whose editor had written that, ‘although this might be interesting, we both had to admit that popular songs really had no academic significance’. Today, exactly fifty years later, the position of popular music studies within the academy is far removed from Browne's experience: there are multiple academic journals and scholarly press book series devoted solely to popular music, scholars regularly present papers on popular music topics at academic conferences, and departments across colleges and universities offer an increasingly wide variety of popular music courses. Popular music has even become a viable area of interest within music scholarship.

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Defining Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Music

Cited by 8 publications

References 61 publications

Atonal Music: Can Uncertainty Lead to Pleasure?

Atonal Music: Can Uncertainty Lead to Pleasure?

Institutions Against Art Music—Curation, Rehearsal, and Contemporary Art

Looking Towards the Future: Popular Music Studies and Music Scholarship

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