Contemporary Music and the Methods of its Analysis

Аннотация

The article raises the question of what is considered to be contemporary music today. The  author  notes  the  variability  of  the  interpretation  of  this  concept,  due  to  the  change of  the  philosophical  and  aesthetic  attitudes  in  recent  art,  emphasizing  that  the  concept of “contemporaneity,” which has been developed in European culture, is now unable to reflect adequately the essence of what is happening. The article is devoted to the approaches of analysis of contemporary music that can be found in the Proceedings of the European Music Analysis Conferences (EuroMAC). Three conferences that took place in 2014, 2017 and 2021 were used as sources of information on analysis of contemporary music. A study of this body of texts shows that contemporary music analysis at the present moment has not demonstrated any fundamentally new means of study, but the present-day methods are numerous in their quantity, and the main process of their application is concentrated on the expansion of musical material.

Keywords: contemporary music, academic music, popular music, music analysis, corpus studies, conferences EuroMAC