New music
Umbrella term for advanced art music since about 1910.
What it means
New music is an umbrella term for the advanced art music of the 20th and 21st centuries that deliberately turns away from the traditions of tonal music. It begins around 1910, when composers such as Arnold Schoenberg abandoned tonality. The term was coined by the critic Paul Bekker around 1919.
It includes very different trends: free atonality, twelve-tone music, serial music, aleatory music, electronic music, sound-mass composition, minimalism and new playing techniques.
Musical use
After the Second World War the Darmstadt Summer Courses became a center of new music from 1946, where composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez and Luigi Nono tried out new paths. John Cage introduced chance. Since the 1970s, trends such as New Simplicity or spectral music have stood beside the avant-garde.
New music should be distinguished from classical modernism in the narrower sense, which means works by Bartók, Stravinsky or Schoenberg, for example, and from popular music, which goes its own way. "Contemporary music" is a more general term.
Performance practice
When you play new music, read the instructions in the score carefully, since notation and signs are often new. Trust the pulse you count inwardly and take time to explore the new sounds.