Contemporary Orchestral
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Contemporary orchestral writing expands the symphonic palette through extended techniques, percussion-heavy color, spectral resonance, huge dynamic spans, and nontraditional formal pacing. It can be violently percussive, hovering and atmospheric, or postminimal and propulsive, but it nearly always treats the orchestra as a laboratory of massed timbre rather than merely a vehicle for 19th-century rhetoric.
History
Postwar orchestral music moved beyond late-Romantic sweep into serial precision, sonorist mass, spectral color, minimalist pulse, environmental vastness, and neo-tonal lyric return; by the late 20th century, living-composer commissions from orchestras in North America, Britain, and continental Europe had created a new mainstream of contemporary orchestral repertoire, from Adams and Adès to Saariaho, Higdon, Chin, and John Luther Adams.
Defining artists
Essential listening
Sources
- Encyclopaedia Britannica
- New Music USA
- Cambridge University Press. citeturn10view2turn3search5turn9search4