New simplicity
The New Simplicity is a style of New Music . A definition is difficult insofar as the term does not designate a fixed “school” or grouping in new music, but rather a compositional attitude . In most cases, the term is not used by the composers themselves, but rather coined by musicologists (since the late 1970s) or music journalists to describe this phenomenon. The composers, on the other hand, preferred other terminology, such as New Diversity or New Uniqueness , as Wolfgang Rihm suggested in 1977.
background
In addition to atonal music , the twelve-tone technique or the completely determined composition in serialism , there have always been composers such as Karl Amadeus Hartmann or Allan Pettersson - to name just two - who continued to develop a “simpler” way of composing that was more tonic .
After the end of serialism around the end of the 1960s, there was a noticeable increase in the trend towards more easily comprehensible music. While composers like Helmut Lachenmann tended towards the extremes of musical expression, at the same time there were composers who once again included traditional elements. This relates to all possible musical parameters, but served the overriding will of "comprehensibility", which is mainly achieved through emotional musical gestures. Since one can "simply" compose with various means, the term was associated with composers of minimal music as well as neoclassicism and neo-romanticism . The degree to which means of the new simplicity are used, such as the integration of tonal sounds or traditional work forms, varies depending on the composer and the work.
Representatives of the new simplicity in the broadest sense include Arvo Pärt , Peter Michael Hamel , Hans-Jürgen von Bose , Ludovico Einaudi , Wolfgang Rihm, Manfred Trojahn , Kevin Volans , Walter Zimmermann and Wolfgang von Schweinitz . But there are also works by Rihm or Hamel that do not communicate in an "easily understandable" way.
Some of them have meanwhile trained students themselves, so that today there is talk of a “Second New Simplicity”; This includes Matthias Pintscher , Jörg Widmann and Rebecca Saunders , among others .
literature
- Otto Kolleritsch (Ed.): On the “New Simplicity” in Music . Universal Edition , Vienna 1981, ISBN 3-7024-0153-9 .
- Viviane Waschbüsch: La notion de simplicité comme concept de création dans la musique contemporaine d'Allemagne: positionnement entre sources et légitimation . Dissertation. Sorbonne, Paris 2016.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Rainer Nonnenmann: Borrowed Pathos. Critical thoughts on a "Second New Simplicity" using the example of Matthias Pinscher . In: The music research . tape 57 , 2004, ISSN 0027-4801 , p. 215–233 ( digizeitschriften.de - access only possible via login).