ABSTRACT
Rebecca Saunders and Jennifer Walshe are both composers of what is often termed 'New Music'. The term 'material' is, then, highly conceptualised and important within New Music discourse. When these elements are teamed with the consideration of material that arose from Dahlhaus's essay, this implies that only certain types of complexity, process and thinking are valued within a New Music conception of material. Catherine Parsons Smith describes three patriarchal traditions at the beginning of the twentieth century - serialism, neoclassicism and futurism - claiming that all of these exclude women linguistically. In fact, they all link to the New Music tradition in some way. Their convergence can be described broadly as 'Musical Modernism', which is also the best name give to the ideology of the new music scene in northern Europe and specifically Germany, as a set of ideas which owe their development to, and thus belong to, the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century.
