Critical Guides to Contemporary Composers – serie

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, multi-layered compositions intrigue musicians while pushing 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 both musician and thinker. Debuting in celebration of Ferneyhough’s 70th birthday in 2013, this book balances 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 hitherto.

The first book-length study in English of composer Mathias Spahlinger, one of Germany’s leading practitioners of contemporary music. One of the most stimulating and provocative figures on the new music scene on Germany, he has long been a touchstone for leftist, ‘critical’ composition there, yet his work has received very little attention in Anglophone scholarship until now. Born in 1944, Spahlinger has risen only gradually to prominence in his native Germany and for many years was considered an outsider within the contemporary music scene. Yet, his position as one of the most venerable exponents of post-WWII modernism in his homeland is now undeniable: his music is regularly performed, he has received commissions from many of the major orchestras and new music groups in Germany, and in 2014 he received the Großen Berliner Kunstpreis (Berlin Art Prize – Grand Prize) from the city’s Akademie der Künste (Academy of Arts).Spahlinger is, however, becoming increasingly known as a significant figure within later twentieth-century music – in 2015, a festival in Chicago focused exclusively on his music, and he was a keynote speaker at a conference on Compositional Aesthetics and the Political at Goldsmiths, University of London.This new book provides an essential reference for scholars of new music and twentieth-century modernism. There are no other book-length studies of Spahlinger in English, though there is a monograph and a book of essays in German, and books of interviews. This original work promises a more critical perspective upon the composer and his aesthetics and political ideas compared to previous publications. The illustrations include musical examples.Its primary market will be a specialist musicological readership, including academics, researchers and composers, but the writing style such that it could be accessible also to undergraduates interested in the field. The discussion of aesthetic debates in post-war Germany, and the interesting reading of the work of Jacques Rancière, means that it could also have significant appeal across the disciplines of philosophy and critical theory.

The first book-length study in English of composer Mathias Spahlinger, one of Germany’s leading practitioners of contemporary music. One of the most stimulating and provocative figures on the new music scene on Germany, he has long been a touchstone for leftist, ‘critical’ composition there, yet his work has received very little attention in Anglophone scholarship until now. Born in 1944, Spahlinger has risen only gradually to prominence in his native Germany and for many years was considered an outsider within the contemporary music scene. Yet, his position as one of the most venerable exponents of post-WWII modernism in his homeland is now undeniable: his music is regularly performed, he has received commissions from many of the major orchestras and new music groups in Germany, and in 2014 he received the Großen Berliner Kunstpreis (Berlin Art Prize – Grand Prize) from the city’s Akademie der Künste (Academy of Arts).Spahlinger is, however, becoming increasingly known as a significant figure within later twentieth-century music – in 2015, a festival in Chicago focused exclusively on his music, and he was a keynote speaker at a conference on Compositional Aesthetics and the Political at Goldsmiths, University of London.This new book provides an essential reference for scholars of new music and twentieth-century modernism. There are no other book-length studies of Spahlinger in English, though there is a monograph and a book of essays in German, and books of interviews. This original work promises a more critical perspective upon the composer and his aesthetics and political ideas compared to previous publications. The illustrations include musical examples.Its primary market will be a specialist musicological readership, including academics, researchers and composers, but the writing style such that it could be accessible also to undergraduates interested in the field. The discussion of aesthetic debates in post-war Germany, and the interesting reading of the work of Jacques Rancière, means that it could also have significant appeal across the disciplines of philosophy and critical theory.

Bernhard Lang: Critical Guides to Contemporary Composers offers a critical guide and introduction to the work of Austrian composer Bernhard Lang (b. 1957). It identifies the phenomenon of repetition as a central concern in Lang’s thinking and making. The composer’s artistic practice is identified as one of ‘loop aesthetics’: a creative poetics in which repetition serves not only as methodology, but also as material, language, and subject matter.The book is structured around the four central thematic nodes of philosophy, music, theatre, and politics. After introducing Lang as a composer whose work is thoroughly influenced by philosophical thought, the book develops a typology of musical repetition as it is explored and activated in Lang’s oeuvre.Pointing towards the several repetitions within the performance of Lang’s works, the book explores the heavily trans-medial nature of the repeat across domains such as literature, dance, and theatre. Finally, the book investigates Lang’s use of textual quotation and musical borrowing.Christine Dysers is a musicologist specialising in contemporary music aesthetics. Her research centres around repetition, politics, absence, the liminal, and the uncanny. This is the first full-length study of the works of Bernhard Lang and is a new volume in the Critical Guides to Contemporary Composers series from Intellect.