Reconceiving Structure in Contemporary Music (New Tools in Music Theory and Analysis)

This book studies recent music in the western classical tradition, offering a critique of current analytical/theoretical approaches and proposing alternatives. It addresses the fringe status of recent music and demonstrates that existing descriptive languages and analytical approaches don’t provide adequate tools to address it in productive terms. Lochhead offers new ways to conceive works, their structurings of musical experience and time, and the procedures and goals of analytic close reading, defining tools that engage the perspectives of composers, performers, and listeners. This book will be of interest to scholars of classical music, and music theory, musicology, and aural culture.