Essays on Traditional and Avant-Garde Composers: Shifting Paradigms and Multifaceted Identities

This is a collection of essays by composers, musicologists and performers about different social, technical and aesthetic aspects of contemporary art music (also known as new music, contemporary music or contemporary classical). This book provides music enthusiasts, performers, composers and researchers with insights into the nature of the relationship between contemporary composers and audiences, and what and how composers think as they conceive of pieces in their imaginations and commit them to paper. Four complete scores are also included, which were selected for recognition by the academic committee of the symposium at Nanhua University at which earlier versions of these papers initially appeared. This book includes valuable papers by Han Chinese writers whose perspectives on contemporary art music appear less frequently in anglophone academic writing. The chapter on Chinese music in Taiwan provides historical information otherwise almost entirely unavailable in English.