role of music
...ological) impoverishment and a strategy of (hypertechnical) enrichment with respect to space-time, is always present for modern and contemporary artists, even if it is not always decisive or decided, not above all resolved. In both cases, the point is to make felt (through feeling, emotion) what is insensible in the spatial and/or temporal sensory field, what is invisible, inaudible. But one can manage to do this, or believe one has managed to, either by default or excess, by going either towards what is most elementary or supposed to be, or towards the most complex (or what is supposed to be). Since the advent of electronic music and the development of aleatory methods both of writing and of performance, a `composition' in which the music is forever new, forever strange, forever defying recognizability and accommodation within the already known musical forms or systematicities, has become dominant in much new music...[T]he musical textures of a composer such as Reich, or the heavily overloaded pieces of Ligety...make it difficult to hear the wor...