Music After the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture Since 1989

by Tim Rutherford-Johnson

"...the best extant map of our sonic shadowlands, and it has changed how I listen." —Alex Ross, The New Yorker
 
"...an essential survey of contemporary music." — New York Times
 
"…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
 
2017 Music Book of the Year—Alex Ross, The New Yorker

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. 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.

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. 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.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, History, Art

348 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2017

Reviews

[Ola · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book that I am very happy that exists, although I didn't enjoy reading it that much. In large parts, I feel it's too much a catalogue of works and styles, and too little analysis and insight. On the other hand, this is a pioneering work trying to make sense of a very diverse and complex material.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this book, Tim Rutherford-Johnson aims to provide a vast survey of directions in “contemporary classical” or “avant-garde classical” since 1989 into the early millennium. In many ways, Music after the Fall picks up from Alex Ross’s famous The Rest is Noise which examined the various directions and tensions in classical music over the 20th century. The year 1989 makes a good cutoff point for a sequel to Ross’s book, as after the 1980s the modern composition scene could not longer be summed up as split between “tonality/romanticism/whatever” and “atonality/serialism/whatever”. Rather, there has been a huge explosion in approaches that has led to the death of any central narratives, and electronics and give-and-take with pop music have radically altered what audiences can hear at performances.

Thus, Tim Rutherford-Johnson takes us through such scenes as “Holy Minimalism” in the early 1990s (labels seeking to market Pärt, Gorecki, and Tavener recordings to a mass audience), the Japanese noise musician Merzbow, and non-Western composers engaging with the Western tradition. He shows us composers who have created their works by drawing on mass media and the internet, feminist directions in which music is meant to express and relate to the body. Readers will learn of composers who center their music in peculiar rituals, sometimes involving extreme performance decisions or lasting many days. He covers the makeup, aesthetic, and approach of post-1989 ensembles like John Zorn’s band, Bang On a Can, or ELISON.

Music After the Fall is open to the critique that its mere 350 pages cannot really give full justice to any one figure discussed here, but Tim Rutherford-Johnson is obviously aware of that and the book only aims to give a general survey. A list of composers and relevant recordings is provided at the end of the book, and readers are supposed to hit YouTube or whatever and do more exploring on their own.

I am familiar with a large amount of the music discussed in this book, but Music After the Fall did leave me with an expanded appreciation of what I already knew, and I also discovered a lot of interesting pieces and figures. Though published by a university press, this is written in a general, approachable style, and while there is a slight bit of resorting to academic tropes (e.g. citing Susan McClary for something as if she has anything meaningful to say in that regard), for the most part the book avoids value judgements and cultural wars and simply aims to delight in the music available to us today.

[Bill Hsu · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think even my eclectic friends, who cut our collective cross-genre musical teeth reading John Corbett, Peter Margasak, Option/Sound Choice etc since the late 80s, might be impressed with the range of music overviewed here. There's valuable discussion of the financing, production, presentation, and use of a variety of interesting work, in addition to the purely (?) musical aspects. The prose may be rather academic, and I may not always agree with the theoretical framework and particular details (from his reductionist description of Max/MSP, the author does not seem to be an experienced user); but this has been one of the more impressive books on new music that I've come across in years.

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book covers contemporary western art music since 1989, concentrating on the more avant-garde and experimental corners. Rutherford-Johnson does not attempt a complete or exhaustive survey, opting instead to examine the music through several themes that inspire, inform, and shape it: globalization, abundance, loss, mobility, fluidity, etc. It was all very interesting, and I especially liked that I didn't know most of the pieces discussed and now have a huge amount of exciting listening to do. The prose is clear and compelling, and Rutherford-Johnson's descriptions and discussions of the pieces he covers make you want to hear them, which is a hall mark of good music writing for me.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

After I raved about The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, I was encouraged to read this book to read more about the world of composed music since 1989.

WHAT I LIKED
This book certainly forced me to change my opinion on a falsehood I've been uttering for years, and that is that there haven't been any compositional innovations since about 1980, only technological ones. Tim Rutherford-Johnson explores the many types of innovations that composers have been using since then. He also does a good job in exploring a variety of composers and sorts them by themes such as nostalgia, politics, etc. There are a ton of suggested pieces for listening.

WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE
While Alex Ross gave a history of 20th century music in a way that was passionate and exciting to the point where I couldn't wait to listen or re-listen to every piece he mentioned, the author of this book is not nearly as persuasive. I don't know if it's the compositions themselves that he describes or the way he describes them, but only about 4 or 5 times did I feel compelled to even write down a piece for future reference. It's hard to know where the line is between how I really felt about this book and any jadedness I may feel as a composer who has never felt at home among contemporary expectations.

[Eva]

very solid survey of contemporary composition with some inevitable lacunae (we can get pages on a one trick pony like merzbow but little on o'rourke, editions mego, glitch in general; nothing on the industrial music scene and neo-dada approaches; very little on GRM) but still fairly insightful when rutherford-johnson chooses to dive into the works more deeply (particularly appreciate the focus on undersung personages like peter ablinger and michael finnissy in addition to the big names).

[Richard Bravman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Our Sonic Landscape

Surveyed and explored deeply, in all of its rich variety, the musical space of our times is the subject of this wonderful work. Be curious, and learn about what almost certainly will be terra incognito for you, as a very great deal of it was for me.

[Richard Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Entertaining and informative overview of modern music.

[Sandro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Repository

[Bertrand Marotte · Rating 2 out of 5]

Excellent reference work, with a rich listing of composers and works. But it tends to lack a "big picture" approach and the author gets bogged down in micro descriptions of particular works that are not really helpful or insightful.

[Mills College Library]

780.904 R9755 2017