The Way of the Moderns

Exploring the concept of musical modernism from many different perspectives–including the audience’s often initial rejection; the dominance of popular genres; the blurring of musical genres and categories; the alleged incapacity of modernism to express feelings and its intellectual aloofness; the struggle for an audience in times of a distracting attention economy; the transition from modernist to postmodernist aesthetics; the multicultural and collaborative aspects of many recent musical creations; and the need for questioning the ethics of musical works–they present a non-systematic and yet insightful assessment of some of the crucial issues around contemporary music. The texts address the changing consumption, creation, contexts, and valuations of today’s concert music and, at the same time, highlight the agency of its practitioners–composers, performers, scholars, critics, and the audience–who pursue the way of the moderns.