Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989

Been waiting for this book! A thoroughly enjoyable and engaging read that traces a novel path through the recent history of western art music. Highly recommended.. "Mind- and ear-opening" according to Jude Stewart. One of the most inventive, erudite, ambitious, and wise books I've read on the subject of contemporary music. While it builds on the great precedents—Paul Griffiths's "Modern Music and After", for instance—it attains a new level of synthesis; its categories are artful, networked, and deep. I can't think of a better introduction to the subject.. No wonder they like it. Just sayin' Jehoshephat Buyer beware? All 3 of the people quoted in the blurbs (Ross, Griffiths, Lim) are thanked in the Acknowledgements as major influences on the author and the book. No wonder they like it. Just sayin'.

"an essential survey of contemporary music." 

Drawing connections with the other arts, in particular visual art and architecture, he expands the definition of Western art music to include forms of composition, experimental music, sound art, and crossover work from across the spectrum, inside and beyond the concert hall. Music after the Fall is the first book to survey contemporary Western art music within the transformed political, cultural, and technological environment of the post–Cold War era. In this book, Tim Rutherford-Johnson considers musical composition against this changed backdrop, placing it in the context of globalization, digitization, and new media. Rutherford-Johnson puts forth a new approach to the study of contemporary music that relies less on taxonomies of style and technique than on the comparison of different responses to common themes of permission, fluidity, excess, and loss.. Each chapter is a critical consideration of a wide range of composers, performers, works, and institutions, and develops a broad and rich picture of the new music ecosystem, from North American string quartets to Lebanese improvisers, from electroacoustic music studios in South America to ruined pianos in the Australian outback