Order and Disorder

Order and Disorder is the result of the first International Orpheus Academy for Music Theory, held in 2003. Its theme was 20th century music and theory, especially after the 1950s. Five guest lecturers discussed theoretical, historical and philosophical aspects of this theme in six articles. In "Music-Analytical Trends of the Twentieth Century," Jonathan Dunsby discusses key features in the development of music analysis from prestructuralist to postmodern times. Joseph N. Straus describes different ways in which intervallic and motivic ideas of the musical surface in atonal music are projected over larger spans. Yves Knockaert investigates the controllability of non-intention in Cage's work, the compositional approach of Morton Feldman's "floating thoughts" and the "raw state" of Wolfgang Rihm's music of the 1980s. In "Nature and the Sublime: the Politics of Order and Disorder in Twentieth-Century Music," Max Paddison exposes a history of the concept of nature in relation to music with some references to literature and the visual arts. Konrad Boehmer analyses several aspects of the political economy of music in "Music and Politics." In "Towards a Terza Prattica," he focuses on the perspectives of the paradigmatic change which electric music has caused.