Introduction: “Leaving the twentieth century: Ideas and visions of new musics”

Abstract

In March 1994 a conference took place at Bretton Hall College (University of Leeds — West Yorkshire, UK), hosted by its School of Music. The theme of this three day conference was: “Leaving the Twentieth Century: Ideas and Visions of New Musics”. The aims were expressed as follows: “The conference will provide a forum for personal visions concerning music in the next half-century. As the cultural world shifts its attention to concerns different from those which have preoccupied most of the 20th century, radically different aesthetics must inevitably emerge. Here in the mid-1990s, we find ourselves at the end of two decades which have seen considerable retrenchments in aesthetic outlook, decades which have been unable to show the confidence to envisage the future as other than an unconscious evolution of the present. It therefore seems particularly urgent, at this moment, to begin to rekindle ideas about change and its necessity in art. “More than ever before, the problems confronting us socially and polit...