"New Music" or Classical Music Less Than 100 Years Old

Like "early music" that I talked about a while back, "new music" is a broad term that refers to 'new' classical music. Composers like Philip Glass, Terry Riley and Steve Reich have been around since the late '60s, so you see that 'new' is a relative term in the classical music world. Glass and Reich got lumped in with the minimalism movement, because much of their work is characterized by simple, repeated patterns and motifs that evolve over the performance of the piece. The Glass sound is almost always readily recognizable, and I can't say I've acquired a taste. Reich's "Music for 18 Musicians" is a repeated motif that changes as notes in the pattern are dropped. I think you either love or hate this piece, and I guess I love it, because I have 2 different recordings. There isn't a whole of of difference between the two versions; the ECM premiere version is a little brighter and moves a little faster. The little vocal bits remind me of chirping birds, so the whole piece has a sunny spring feeling to me.








John Adams sounds like a patchwork quilt of a lot of contemporary composers, and "The Chairman Dances" is almost like a resume of his styles.
Best for me is the title track, an instrumental piece excerpted from the opera "Nixon in China", and "Common Tones in Simple Time" slows down as the piece progresses, ending with tinkling chimes and large floating chords, like you've drifted into space surrounded by planets and stars.








Arvo Part takes minimalism to the furthest degree; his pieces have much in common with early Church chant. He started out composing some fairly spiky dissonant works, then developed what he called "tintinnabulation", or the music of bells. His newer works seem simple, but they somehow tap into something primal. A good example is "Passio", a vocal work with biblical lyrics (in Latin) from the last moments of Christ on the Cross. The 70 minute piece is in a minor key for almost the entire time, until the last bit changes to a major key, and it's like the heavens open, a very moving emotional moment.
"Fratres" was a piece on the first ECM disc, and the Telarc disc is mostly versions of "Fratres" with a lot of variations in scoring. Probably Part's most recognizable work is "Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten", which Michael Moore used to such stunning effect to accompany scenes of the Twin Towers aftermath in the film "Fahrenheit 9/11".