First published in 1995

One of contemporary music's most significant and controversial figures, Brian Ferneyhough's complex and challenging music draws inspiration from painting, literature, and philosophy, as well as music from the recent and distant past. His dense, multilayered compositions intrigue musicians while pushing both performer and instrument to the limits of their abilities. A wide-ranging survey of his life and work to date, Brian Ferneyhough examines the critical issues fundamental to understanding the composer as a musician and a thinker. Debuting in celebration of Ferneyhough's seventieth birthday in 2013, this book strikes a rich balance between critical analysis of the music and close scrutiny of its aesthetic and philosophical contexts, making possible a more rounded view of the composer than has been available.

This collection brings fresh perspectives to bear upon key questions surrounding the composition, performance and reception of musical modernism.

This collection of essays offers a historical reappraisal of what musical modernism was, and what its potential for the present and future could be. It thus moves away from the binary oppositions that have beset twentieth-century music studies in the past, such as those between modernism and postmodernism, between conceptions of musical autonomy and of cultural contingency and between formalist-analytical and cultural-historical approaches. Focussing particularly on music from the 1970s to the 1990s, the volume assembles approaches from different perspectives to new music with a particular emphasis on a critical reassessment of the meaning and function of the legacy of musical modernism. The authors include scholars, musicologists and composers who combine culturally, socially, historically and aesthetically oriented approaches with analytical methods in imaginative ways.

This indispensable handbook explains how scholars and students should work with and think about the composer's working manuscripts.

Shadowtime is a thought opera based on the work and life of the German philosopher, essayist and cultural critic Walter Benjamin. The libretto was written by Bernstein for composer Brian Ferneyhough and was premiered at the Munich Biennale. In its seven scenes Shadowtime explores some of the major themes of Benjamin's work, including the intertwined natures of history, time, transcience, language and melancholy. Beginning on the last evening of Benjamin's life, Shadowtime projects an alternate course for what happened that fateful night.

"...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.