After Webern, composers split: total control or none
"Contemporary classical" once meant post-1945 music after Anton Webern—serialism, electronics, chance procedures, and minimalism. Some modernists ordered every musical parameter tightly; others abdicated control through indeterminacy. Both revolts still shape what new-music concerts program today.
Early-twentieth dissonance and postwar neoclassic backlash set the stage. In Europe, Messiaen pupils Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, with Luigi Nono, pushed integral serialism linked to ideas like Le Corbusier's modulor, while Shostakovich and Britten kept tonal idioms. American counterparts ranged from Milton Babbitt's serial extensions to John Cage and Henry Cowell's experiments that questioned notation, duration, and repetition; Philip Glass and Steve Reich built minimalism from tape loops and pulse.
Personal computers between about 1975 and 1990 made electronic studios affordable—composition, synthesis, and sampling on one desk. Spectral music and post-minimalism joined later vocabularies; New Complexity composers such as Ferneyhough and Finnissy answered New Simplicity with microtones, extended techniques, and notation dense enough to demand virtuoso decoding. Historicism revived medieval laude and period instruments; ambient neo-classical crossovers from Max Richter to Ólafur Arnalds widened the listening tent beyond specialist halls.
Film helped smuggle the avant-garde into popular ears: Kubrick's 2001 and Eyes Wide Shut drew on Ligeti; The Shining mixed Ligeti with Penderecki; Godard and Roeg used Stockhausen. Boston Conservatory at Berklee stages some 700 performances yearly, about 150 of them new student works—evidence that "contemporary" is not a closed museum but an ongoing workshop. Statistics for the United States suggest most composers also never abandoned tonal-oriented mainstream practice even while high modernism roared across campuses and festivals. Naming remains contested, yet the repertory keeps expanding.
Source: Contemporary classical music
