“Zero Gravity”: A Specific Textural Type in Contemporary European Art Music

Abstract

Unlike the pointillist style of mid-century serialism, contemporary European art music possesses gestural-textural units with the potential to stimulate the listener to form associative links. This paper focuses on a specific slow-paced textural type, which appears to have emerged as part of the vocabulary of today’s music and suggests it may fruitfully be analysed in the light of various perspectives of musical gestures. While such an approach suggests a path going beyond analytical methods focusing on the internal working mechanisms of the post-serial repertory, it will in fact concentrate on auditory perception of the gestural-textural vocabulary of this repertory and its expressive qualities, from the oft-neglected listener’s experience. This study focuses on prominent composers of contemporary European concert music, who follow the modernist lines of the avant-garde, including Ivan Fedele (b.1953), Michael Jarrell (b.1958), Unsuk Chin (b.1961), Philippe Hurel (b.1955), and aims to lay the groundwork for further study to put the repertory in question in a historical, cultural and stylistic perspective.