ABSTRACT
This chapter explores new musics reputation for the innovative, experimental and unorthodox has faded. It argue that irrespective of whether the composer is a supporter or an antagonist of, or even ambivalent to, the dominant aesthetic derived from the post-serial, atonal aesthetic, this music is nourished by the image of the composer as autonomous, heroic creator. The composer composes out of the dominant aesthetic, reducing it to a form of central intelligence. The student composer begins to be composed of the music fed to the class. It is a diet, predominantly, of twentieth-century Western art music which, they discover, is correlated to the work of exceptionally gifted composers. Here postmodernism is discussed as if it is a musical style involving polystylism and quotation. In the neo-romantic vision, musical formalism governs musical comprehension. The chapter concludes with a different sketch of a composition class modelled on a Deleuzian concept of machinic assemblage.
