ABSTRACT
As scholars, we strive to efface ourselves in favour of the phenomena we study; as music historians, we shape history, but only after we let the data we take in shape us.1 Working as a music critic in the 1980s and 1990s, I became aware of a new repertoire of music whose stylistic commonalities were too striking to ignore. The music, mostly American in the concerts I heard, was overwhelmingly diatonic in its scales and harmonies. A grid of steady beats was almost always maintained – often throughout an entire work or movement – and without change of tempo. Dynamics tended to be monochrome or terraced, with little of the expressive fluidity one associates with music of the late Romantic or modernist eras. In its circumscribed materials and emotional staticness (which is not to say that it was unemotive, but rather that it tended to maintain one affect throughout), the music was analogous to certain genres of Baroque music, particularly German and Italian instrumental music of the late Baroque, though using a harmonic syntax that was in no way conventional. One of the most intriguing aspects of this repertoire was that it ranged in typology from highly structured to completely intuitive, with every nuance possible in between these two polarities.
