Hip-hop artist Kendrick Lamar’s 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Music win in April “made me think about the changing nature of ‘distinguished musical composition,’ ” writes Alex Ross in the August 27 issue of the New Yorker. “Circa 1950, this was understood to mean writing a score for others to perform…. By century’s end, a composer could be a performance artist, a sound artist, a laptop conceptualist, or an avant-garde d.j. … Writing overnight history is a perilous task, but the British critic Tim Rutherford-Johnson manages the feat in ‘Music After the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture Since 1989’ (University of California).… The ‘fall’ in the title points most obviously to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, but it has wider resonances…. Rutherford-Johnson mentions ‘something indefinable’ in the Western classical tradition that attracts creative musicians … even if they end up rebelling against that tradition…. This September, the New York Philharmonic will give the première of Ashley Fure’s ‘Filament.’ … Some members of the gala audience may squirm at Fure’s fiercely bright chords and distorted, staticky instrumental textures. When, at the end of the program, they rise to cheer ‘The Rite of Spring,’ they should remember that they are applauding yesterday’s unlistenable noise.”
Posted August 23, 2018
