Table of Contents

List of illustrations Acknowledgments 1. 1989 and After 2. Mediation and the Marketplace 3. Permission: Freedom, Choice, and the Body 4. Fluidity: Digital Translations, Displacements, and Journeys 5. Mobility: Worldwide Flows, Networks, and Archipelagos 6. Superabundance: Spectacle, Scale, and Excess 7. Loss: Ruins, Memorials, and Documents 8. Recovery: Gaps between Past and Present Appendix 1: Recommended Listening Appendix 2: Further Reading Notes Index

About the Author

Tim Rutherford-Johnson is a London-based music journalist and critic. He was the contemporary music editor at Grove Music Online and edited the most recent edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Music. He has taught at Goldsmiths College and Brunel University, and since 2003 he has written about new music for his blog, The Rambler.

Reviews

"...an essential survey of contemporary music." 
*New York Times*

"...Rutherford-Johnson catalogues the bewildering diversity of twenty-first-century composed music, and, more important, makes interpretative sense of a corpus that ranges from symphonies and string quartets to improvisations on smashed-up pianos found in the Australian outback..."Music After the Fall” is the best extant map of our sonic shadowlands, and it has changed how I listen." Alex Ross
*The New Yorker*

"In relaxed and readable prose, Rutherford-Johnson describes in detail how pieces of new music might be received, experienced or understood by a general audience, without any need for a background in musical training...an informed, engaged and thoughtful account."
*The Journal of Music*

"Music After the Fall succeeds, faced with a bewildering range of styles, in showing us how to approach the at times forbidding terrain of contemporary music."
*Gramophone*

2017 Music Book of the Year -- Alex Ross
*The New Yorker*

"This remarkable feat of synthesis and analysis...has fundamentally changed my vision of the music of our time. No one who seriously follows contemporary music should be without it." -- Alex Ross
*The Rest is Noise*

"Music After the Fall is sharp, provacative and always on the money. The listening list alone promises months of fresh discovery, the main text a fresh new way of navigating the world of sound." 
*The Wire*