ABSTRACT
This chapter provides some notes on what appear to be some of the major trends in present-day composition and on some of the composers who are active and recognized within these trends. Perhaps the most accurate concepts to describe the compositional scene in the early twenty-first century are eclecticism and pluralism. The most contrasting and varied compositional techniques and approaches seem to coexist, and this is perhaps one of the times in the whole history of music when composers have had the most options. One of the leading figures in this category is the influential British composer and teacher Brian Ferneyhough, who has practiced and proposed an aesthetic of “new complexity” or “maximalism,” characterized by the use of highly complex techniques and textures and by the frequent intersection of electronic and acoustic techniques. Typically post-Romantic traits in this composition are its chromatic and motivic character, its improvisatory and rhapsodic nature, and its processes of formal growth in fortspinnung style.
