Perspectives for Contemporary Music in the 21st Century eds. by Dániel Péter Biró and Kai Johannes Polzhofer (review)

This book contains a series of essays from the conference "New Tendencies of Contemporary Music in Germany," held in 2015 at Harvard University and at Boston's Goethe-Institut. The gathering brought together composers (both well established and less experienced), musicologists, and cultural critics from Europe and America. A significant contribution from women composers and scholars brings a very welcome diversity to the resulting collection published here. Ranging broadly in scope within the new-music culture of Germany, the essays vary considerably in depth and in breadth. Although several remain in their original German, most of the essays are in English.

A few common threads run through the book. In addition to providing a lively cultural critique of music's function in society and its relationship to institutions, it examines timely questions, such as the way the Internet has changed contemporary music and our ability to make aesthetic judgments about new musical works. Many of the authors reveal anxiety over the commercial influence of popular culture. The book paints a picture of new music that is mainly viewed from the position of those who have enjoyed some success within the established, institutional system of musical production in Germany—for example, composers Helmut Lachenmann, Brian Ferneyhough, Gérard Grisey, and György Kurtág. Although it stems from the earlier work of Luigi Nono, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and John Cage, the book represents a variety of perspectives and provokes new questions.

Many concerns that the authors express have become exponentially more urgent following the 2016 United States election and the serious difficulties experienced in Germany when forming a governing coalition after the Alternative für Deutschland party won nearly 13 percent of the vote in September 2017. In retrospect, it may seem that the essays emerge from a time "just before the storm," at a point in history when the cauldron was about to boil over. What kind of economic and cultural conditions gave rise to the renewed popularity of right-wing political organizations? Allan Antliff's unusual contribution, "Glamourized," does not deal with music at all but rather analyzes the way in which the American visual artist Jeff Koons has earned immense profits, in a bizarrely distorted art market, by fabricating pieces from readily available commercial objects and working on grand commissions within a pop-art aesthetic. By way of the economic theory of Fredric Jameson, Antliff's analysis of the conditions that led to Koons's spectacular rise result, somewhat predictably, in a cynical conclusion: "postmodernism serves a social purpose, namely to repress critical thought on the part of the public, whom [Koons] regards as infantile" (p. 41). This essay might have seemed out of place in this book had it not been for the unexpected rise of Donald Trump in the political sphere. Instead, Anliff's analysis is surprisingly prescient, even though it does not directly engage with music.

The collection includes an interesting series of artist manifestos that have become something of a specialty for the Wolke publishing house. Ming Tsao's essay "Dia lectical Composing" ranks as the most significant. Central to Tsao's philosophy is the synthesis of Lachenmann's concept of Strukturklang with Ferneyhough's idea of the "figure" into an approach Tsao calls "lyric subjectivity." The goal is to "discover beauty, violence and desire within a complex exterior world of sounds placed under formal pressures that are dialectically mediated through simulative invention and discursive reference" (p. 88). Tsao's approach does not only revolve around his own music but also is sensitive to the performers themselves. His desire to open the "path to their dignity and freedom" and to interconnect performers by imbuing their actions with "a larger sense of musical communication" (p. 90) is an admirable ethical statement, but it borders on the utopian. Littered with pithy quotations from a dizzying variety...