Description
Book SynopsisA survey of contemporary Western art music within the transformed political, cultural, and technological environment of the post-Cold War era. It considers musical composition against this changed backdrop, placing it in the context of globalization, digitization, and new media.
Trade Review"...an essential survey of contemporary music." * New York Times *
"...Rutherford-Johnson catalogues the bewildering diversity of twenty-first-century composed music, and, more important, makes interpretative sense of a corpus that ranges from symphonies and string quartets to improvisations on smashed-up pianos found in the Australian outback..."Music After the Fall” is the best extant map of our sonic shadowlands, and it has changed how I listen." Alex Ross * The New Yorker *
"In relaxed and readable prose, Rutherford-Johnson describes in detail how pieces of new music might be received, experienced or understood by a general audience, without any need for a background in musical training...an informed, engaged and thoughtful account." * The Journal of Music *
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Music After the Fall succeeds, faced with a bewildering range of styles, in showing us how to approach the at times forbidding terrain of contemporary music." * Gramophone *
2017 Music Book of the Year -- Alex Ross * The New Yorker *
"This remarkable feat of synthesis and analysis...has fundamentally changed my vision of the music of our time. No one who seriously follows contemporary music should be without it." -- Alex Ross * The Rest is Noise *
"Music After the Fall is sharp, provacative and always on the money. The listening list alone promises months of fresh discovery, the main text a fresh new way of navigating the world of sound." * The Wire *
Table of ContentsList of illustrations Acknowledgments 1. 1989 and After 2. Mediation and the Marketplace 3. Permission: Freedom, Choice, and the Body 4. Fluidity: Digital Translations, Displacements, and Journeys 5. Mobility: Worldwide Flows, Networks, and Archipelagos 6. Superabundance: Spectacle, Scale, and Excess 7. Loss: Ruins, Memorials, and Documents 8. Recovery: Gaps between Past and Present Appendix 1: Recommended Listening Appendix 2: Further Reading Notes Index
