ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how conflict works, highlighting, in particular, the dissonance between economics and aesthetics in new music. It argues that the neoliberal, capitalist framework gives rise to the figure of the entrepreneurial composer who territorialises the spaces of new music and converts the musical end-product into capital flow. The fundamental questions threaded through the chapter, then, are about the extent to which the rhetoric of excellence, attached to the idea of the autonomous composer, becomes the object of desire, and the extent to which money. It suggests new music is marketed in the languages of excellence. These languages are removed from their original context in Enlightenment aesthetics and are used to sell music as a commodity. The chapter explores to open new music and its practices to new possibilities, and to the idea that it may be renewed through enacting radical transformations and counter-actualisations.
