ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses some of the ramifications of globalization for the concept of new music, particularly in the 1970s and analyses how Aldo Clementi reflects on the disappearance of the bourgeois practice of domestic music-making in the work. It describes the relation of music to politics in the spectralists' work as a homology, in Gerhard Stabler's work and demonstrates political and ideological action to a large extent determines compositional aesthetics and praxis. The book argues that the terms used to speak and write about contemporary music are frequently hostage to intellectual complacency, cliches and unacknowledged assumptions and biases. It also argues that enigma, by retaining distance, perhaps paradoxically creates a kind of intimacy that is the obverse of the false familiarity produced by the 'entertainment industry'.
