ABSTRACT
For lack of a better term, let’s call it new spirituality.” These are the words of Joep Franssens (b. 1955), Dutch representative of the New Spiritual Music movement which finds its most well-known ambassadors in Arvo Pärt and John Tavener. Listening to Franssens’ music and reading his interviews, the agenda, well enough known by now, is unarguably confirmed: walls of saturated, harmonic sounds in generally slow tempi, should exclude too much fragmentarization, incomprehensibility, and rationality, blanketed under the term modernism. “I want to communicate with my music,” says Franssens, who clarifies this further on as “searching for a harmonic balance” in order to “create an ideal world” which opposes modernism, defined by him as “a position from which reason is overvalued and the emotional appreciation of music is neglected” (Franssens 1997: 22).
