ABSTRACT
With the decline in currency of the postmodern, art music culture of the early twenty-first century seems to have few values left to assert apart from its contemporaneity, its sheer presentness. If anything, its particular brand of newness hinges on its claim to break down the putative limits and barriers that modernism erected, among them those of access, medium, location and subjectivity. While introducing three contrasted examples from the ‘expanded field’ of contemporary art music (Anna Clyne’s orchestral work Night Ferry, James Bulley’s and Daniel John Jones’s installation Living Symphonies, and Alvin Curran’s radiophonic Vindobona Blues), this chapter questions both the genuineness and newness of this boundary crossing and asks whether even twenty-first-century music that appears far removed from modernist values can afford entirely to leave them behind.
