Cult I: Contemporary Western Art Music since 1940

We'll explore innovative compositional techniques since 1940, from Europe, the USA, and Russia. Some of the composers whose work we will listen to and analyze will be Arnold Schoenberg, Pierre Boulez, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Helmut Lachenmann, Igor Stravinsky, Sofia Gubaidulina, Edison Denisov, Brian Ferneyhough, and Steve Reich. We'll learn about some of the different aesthetic compositional trends in the past seventy years including atonality, serialism, randomness, minimalism, extended instrumental techniques, process-oriented techniques, complexity, and many more.